Robin Norling, painter and draughtsman (particularly of the figure), teacher and gallery owner, was born in Windsor, New South Wales, in 1939 but grew up in Taree, New South Wales. He studied at the National Art School, Sydney Teachers College and the Royal College of Art, London, UK.
In 1961, aged only twenty-two and still a student at Sydney Teacher’s College, he won the Sulman Prize, for a mural design, Sea movement and rocks . In 1962, having just started teaching art at Macquarie Boys High School, Norling was awarded the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship, which allowed him to travel to Europe and North Africa with his new wife, Elaine Odgers. In 1966, the two of them began their slow return to Australia, driving through Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and immersing themselves in the many cultures they passed through.
On his return to Australia, Norling returned to secondary school teaching and, in 1970, was appointed as a lecturer in art education at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. In the same year he began writing and presenting a weekly ABC radio program aimed at youth, entitled Young World of Art , which ran for four years. From 1978 to 1986 he was senior education officer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, during which time he curated a number of educational exhibitions, including 'Light and Shadow’ and 'Composition is Artist’s Glue’. This position gave him a remarkable opportunity to study, at his leisure, some of the greatest paintings in the country, including works by less well-known artists such as the British Victorian painters Lord Frederick Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Norling realised that these artists were more than the sentimental storytellers that contemporary taste held them to be.
In 1986 Norling left his position at the Gallery and took up a position at Meadowbank College of TAFE, teaching painting and drawing. By now he and Elaine had gone their separate ways, and he developed a friendship with Jocelyn Maughan, an accomplished realist painter who was the head of art at the College. In 1997 he retired from teaching and returned to full-time painting. He and Jocelyn relocated to Patonga, on the New South Wales Central Coast, to a beachside house, studio and gallery, known as the Bakehouse Gallery.
Norling is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Charles Sturt University (Goulburn campus) and the University of Sydney (Sydney Institute of Education).
Acknowledgments to Peter Pinson, for his introduction to Robin Norling, Phillip Matthews, 2010, for much of the information contained herein.
- Writers:
- Cooper, Jonathan
Pinson, Peter
- Date written:
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