Robinson, Clifford

Clifford Robinson was born in Alberta in 1917. He studied art in Calgary at the Provincial Institute of Technology (which eventually evolved into the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, and the Alberta College of Art, now the Alberta University of the Arts) and the Banff School of Fine Arts. He studied under some of the most influential teachers in Alberta at that time, H.G. Glyde, A.C. Leighton and Walter J. Phillips.

While Robinson also painted, he is best known as a printmaker. It was Walter Phillips who instilled Robinson’s interest in printmaking. Robinson was part of an early group of printmakers in the 1930s and 1940s who embraced the modernist movement and pioneered printmaking techniques in and around Calgary.

From the 1940s, Robinson moved around frequently, spending time in Alberta and British Columbia, in the United States, and then two years in Europe in the early 1950s. Robinson eventually returned to the Banff School of Fine Art where he taught art and theatre design, and became a close associate of A.Y. Jackson

Clifford Robinson eventually retired in Calgary where he died in 1992.