Cut Away Edinburgh with Robbie Bushe RSA: Academician’s Masterclass
Early Bird: £280
Standard: £320
Concession (Student, Senior Citizen (65+), Unemployed, Disabled): £300 10am - 4:30pm
Join acclaimed Scottish artist Robbie Bushe RSA to create your own staged worlds filled with figures, actions and events unfolding across a single composition.
An Early Bird Discount is available for bookings made over 1 month prior to the start date!
Work directly from the streets around the Royal Scottish Academy and transform familiar façades into imagined interior worlds. This masterclass focuses on the cutaway method used in Bushe’s paintings, where buildings are opened up to reveal layered spaces, activity and narrative. Using the contrasts of Georgian Princes Street, nearby brutalist architecture and views towards Edinburgh Castle, you’ll move from direct observation into speculative drawing.
We’ll begin the two-day masterclass by exploring Bushe’s work and the concept of the cutaway as a drawing device. We'll continue outdoors around Princes Street, where you will draw a series of façades, comparing Georgian architecture with modern and brutalist forms. Through these studies, you’ll produce drawings that will then be reworked through tracing and redrawing, introducing floor levels and sectional cuts to begin opening the buildings.
Next, you'll develop one drawing by removing walls and revealing the interior, creating spaces that include rooms, figures, movement and light. The final stage of the workshop focuses on refining your drawing, clarifying structure, adding tone or colour and editing before concluding with a group discussion.
Participants should bring an A3 sketchbook or loose sheets, a range of pencils (2B–6B), a fineliner and an eraser. Tracing paper is recommended, along with optional materials such as ink or watercolour wash.
We’re currently offering two Masterclasses with Robbie Bushe: Cut Away Edinburgh and Fragments to Fiction. To book both masterclasses in this series at a combined Early Bird Discount rate of £550, please contact info@royalscottishacademy.org and quote 'Combined Early Bird Discount - Robbie Bushe RSA Masterclasses' in your email. We will then be in touch to arrange payment.
About Robbie Bushe RSA
Robbie Bushe RSA’s practice centres on the depiction of detailed, suggestive narratives, frequently set within expansive architectonic constructions.
‘These masterclasses are rooted directly in my painting practice. My work brings together narrative, structure and invention through images that operate almost like staged worlds. They often contain multiple events happening at once, with figures, spaces, and actions unfolding across a single composition. Alongside this narrative drive, I use the device of the cutaway to open up buildings and civic structures, removing walls and exposing interiors so that inside and outside can be seen simultaneously. At the same time, much of the work begins in the sketchbook through the gathering of fragments, drawn observations, found imagery and collaged material which are edited, combined and transformed into new compositions. Drawing sits at the centre of this process as a way of thinking, testing, and constructing.’
Cutaway Edinburgh and Fragments to Fiction, Bushe’s two masterclasses, separate and focus his key approaches, cutaway construction and fragment-based composition, so that participants can understand how narrative paintings are built from observation, selection and invention.
