Robert Pope Archive

These are two of three illustrations Robert made for a story, Brian’s Dilemma, published in Canadian Forum. The story involved an unemployed fisherman, still a young man, who has moved away in search of work. When he returns home to

In a sketchbook,  Robert notes: “Blood is a simultaneous symbol of birth, life and death. Water operates the same way; a life-giving substance that one can drown in.” Robert often used parallels and contrasts in his work. Here he contrasts an apparatus of modern

Robert draws his own feet on a hospital bed and a window in a bare room opening to a world outside that is inaccessible to him, yet a source of dream and hope. This drawing, made in a downtown Toronto hospital, pictures

This image, showing a father and son eating food from a plate, sitting on a rock surrounded by water as far as the eye can see, was created during the “Illness & Healing” project, but has no obvious connection to

An enormous wave crashes between a couple. The water affirms their sense of  exhilaration, passion, adventure. The painting is from a series based on Elizabeth Smart’s experimental novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat down and Wept. Here is a sample

Robert’s interest in the mythology of pop culture often focused on cars. The Accident series takes, as a point of departure, the breakdown of cars and the subsequent unraveling of a sense of order and certainty. This reflected feelings Robert

In his summary of Elizabeth Smart’s novel, Robert notes that Part 3 contains a “lyrical outpouring of happiness, much water imagery.” In Plunge, Robert captures the freedom and joyous abandon of running near the ocean. In the distance can be seen the

Robert took photos at a Macrobiotic group picnic and the figures in the river suggested a return to health through harmony with nature and community. We see two stages of immersion, as the man treds water, half in and half

This is the second version of Harbour, following dozens of studies. This watercolour was one of the artist’s first images to locate figures in a landscape charged with symbolic intentions. The ocean generates abstract patterns that tantalizingly suggest shapes and images, as if

This is the first image in Robert’s painting cycle detailing an obsessive love triangle. The heroine of the story, a 23-year-old Canadian, arrives in Monterey and marvels at the cliffs overlooking the ocean. She feels these cliffs are a suitable symbol