EDINBURGH.- Make sure you see Ronald Forbes' vibrant, energetic solo exhibition The Everyman Variations in the Academicians' Gallery. You can also purchase your copy of the new publication A Blind Man's Dreams by Tom Normand HRSA on our website.

On completing the design of his book, A Blind Man’s Dreams: The Paintings and Films of Ronald Forbes by Tom Normand HRSA, Forbes became aware of some gaps in his overall oeuvre. There was a period in the 1980s where he produced a range of paintings featuring a collage-formed figure searching for something undeclared among masses of black polythene refuse sacks and heaps of fragments of consumer items. Some of these paintings he felt worked quite well, but others, less so, and he felt the theme was worth further exploration.

These works were inspired by a Bruegel drawing called Elck. Elck was the Netherlandish version of Everyman who figures centrally in a range of morality plays in various European cultures. The Bruegel drawing is regarded as a complex allegory about selfishness, with Elck searching his world for material and social gain.

In the new work Forbes has created a collage figure in a range of postures, carrying a light and a large pair of the kind of eyes found in a child’s doll. These graphically depict methods of producing light and for seeing, and also echo the use of the lantern in Bruegel’s drawing. These ‘characters’ are placed in various versions of a series of simple, stage-like environments, which are formed from images of crossword puzzles or mazes. In each version the Everyman figure is confronted by a box out of which pops a collage-formed aspect of the natural world, such as animal, bird or plant life.

This exhibition is an attempt to fill one of the missing links in the wide survey of Forbes’s work in A Blind Man’s Dreams. It attempts to carry retrospective examination into the present and the future, and to help draw together the complex web of themes and ideas formed in a long life of looking and wondering.

Ronald Forbes RSA studied at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) from 1964 to 1969. After his postgraduate scholarship at ECA he studied education at Jordanhill College, Glasgow. Forbes was Head of Painting at the Crawford School of Art, Cork (1974– 78), an influential lecturer at Glasgow School of Art (1979-1983), before moving to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, where he established and directed the Masters in Public Art and Design and the MFA course (1983-1995), and was Head of Painting (1995–2001).

Forbes has served on the boards of a range of trusts and arts charities including Hospitalfield Arts, Perthshire Public Arts Trust and Dundee Public Art Programme. He was the founder of the Glasgow League of Artists in 1971. Forbes was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1996 and an Academician in 2005.