Robert Pope

Robert Pope was born in 1939 in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, where his father worked extracting gold from the famous Bendigo Goldfields. Despite being classified as colorblind, Pope aspired to become an artist-philosopher from an early age and discovered he actually sees colors vividly, much like his artistic hero, 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner. After his mother passed when he was 14, he postponed his artistic dreams and became a self-taught senior seismic cartographer working throughout outback Australia. In 1964 he resigned to open his own gallery, and just four years later won the Inaugural Centralian Caltex Art Award.
Pope’s unique science-art theories gained international recognition when the Science Unit of Australian National Television documented his Artist-in-Residency at the University of Adelaide in 1978. This led to UNESCO appointing him as a Special Science-Art Delegate to a world Summit Meeting on General Relativity at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. He hand-built The Castle on the Hill, a studio complex in Northern New South Wales that serves as headquarters for the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, where he serves as director.
Pope’s artwork, represented by Park West Gallery, draws inspiration from ancient Egyptian, Islamic and Byzantine cultures. Working with acrylics, he builds layers of paint to mimic the appearance of ancient relics, incorporating symbols that represent knowledge from previous cultures.