Robert Pope Archive

Over six sketchbook pages, Robert developed ideas for a poster for a university conference on “the future of food production.” Here are two of those pages. Robert started with a list of possible ideas, all revolving around the concept of future

In the 1970s and 80s, teachers and students at NSCAD were challenged to examine the nature of the media with which they worked. In this manifesto-like sketchbook entry, Robert asks himself, “Is painting obsolete?” He begins by noting that “Something

Beside two studies for his drawing, Chemotherapy and Christ, Robert has jotted down two lists of ideas for future paintings, as well as a list of chapters for his book, Illness & Healing. The finished book dispenses with these chapter divisions so

Robert used his sketchbooks to generate ideas for paintings. His ideas came from different sources. Here he makes notes from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book, On Death and Dying. Kubler-Ross’s notion that patients and their families pass through 5 stages of dying

In the sketches on this page, Robert works through two metaphors for his painting, The Lavishness of My Feelings. The first metaphor, a woman poised between love and death, comes by way of artist Edvard Munch. The second metaphor makes reference

Under a study for Underground Parking, Robert has written an artist statement for another painting, Harbour. He writes this statement twice, once in a messy version, and then in a neatly printed version. The statement reads: “I believe we take

Robert has drawn a cartoon-like version of the wheel of life, also known as the wheel of becoming. In Buddhist teaching, the term samsara refers to the idea of living, dying and being reborn in another form, cycling through an endless

In a small travel sketchbook, Robert makes notes on diet and health. The left hand page uses a diagram to illustrate how the symptoms of a disease spiral off from the root cause of an illness. Medicine that targets symptoms, rather than root