Robert Pope Archive

This figure in a landscape is drawn with cartoon-like simplicity. The waves of the woman’s hair echo the repeating patterns of the sea. Strong shadows anchor the figure to the bottom of the frame. The figure looks small and ordinary, her face hidden

Waterfall started as a study showing a couple in a room with a typewriter: both lovers are writers. Robert abandoned this idea, but kept the pose of the man with his naked back to the viewer. This marked a turning point in Robert’s

This is one of the final drawings in Robert’s sketchbooks for his “Illness & Healing” series. Robert grew up in the Annapolis Valley, a farming region noted for its beautiful apple orchards. In his study, Robert shows the patient returning home, rising

A patient dreams he is part of a beautiful landscape overlooking the water. Disrupting the serenity of this view are three workmen who dig a large hole in the earth. The landscape resembles Robert’s parent’s property in Mt. Denson, which ran along the river

These distant views of two lovers dancing on a clifftop turn the breath-taking scenery into an impromptu stage. Robert uses light and shade to blend figures and landscape together. Dark shadows give weight and importance to the figures, while the elaborate

Through the skillful use of marks, Robert delineates different spaces of short grass and tall wheat, with the abandoned crutch occupying the boundary between the two. Where is the patient who used and needed the crutch? Has he been mysteriously healed by the

Robert’s “Seal Upon Thine Heart” series is conceived like a Goldberg Variations, but instead of inventing a number of increasingly delightful changes upon a repeating melody, as Bach does, Robert invents changes on a repeating set of visual elements. The

Like a mime artist working without props, the woman cleans an invisible surface–a pane of glass is suggested without actually showing one. (Without the window, it looks like the woman is about to squirt the viewer in the eye. A little

A masked woman, possibly a nurse or doctor, injects a drug into a drowsing patient’s arm. There are no witnesses other than a blank television screen. The semi-conscious cancer patient looks like the martyred hero from the 19th century painting,

Little treasures, humble natural objects available to anyone, were collected for the purpose of drawing. Lupines are delicate violet and mauve-coloured weeds that grow in great clusters in the roadside ditches of Nova Scotia. The flower has a short life. When it