Ronald Forbes: The Everyman Variations

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.

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.