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In The Road to Fochabers, Blyth has placed himself in the country hedgerows of near Elgin, the low evening sun illuminating the high ground, plunging the rest into shadow. He has sought to capture the texture of the landscape, indicating the long grasses by drawing into the wet oil paint with the back of his brush, a technique much favoured by his direct contemporary Joan Eardley. Like his friend and colleague Ian Fleming, Bobby Blyth moved to Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen by ways of Glasgow and Hospitalfield House near Arbroath. He became Head of Painting at Gray’s in 1960 before his premature death in 1970. He was a painter’s painter and was renowned for his brilliant, original draughtsmanship and eye for compositional design. Like Fleming, Blyth found much of his subject matter in the landscape of Aberdeenshire.
Bobby Blyth was a close friend of Gillies, who recruited him to the College staff after the War. They also worked together on the east coast of Scotland and their style at times became very similar, both favouring a pen and wash technique. Blyth was a brilliant draughtsman who made distinctive choices on the information he would include. Much of his work on paper has a relationship with English Neo-Romanticism, in particular Paul Nash, Graeme Sutherland and John Minton. Later, based in Aberdeen, his work became more ‘colour-field’ with the drawing becoming less important.
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