Although born and brought up in Lancashire, much of his career has been spent in London and the South, principally in education.

He has played an active part in the artistic life of Northamptonshire.

Having taught painting and drawing for the Northamptonshire Adult Education Service for over thirty years, he has recently completed ‘The Courteenhall Suite’, a commission of 14 archival drawings of the estate of Sir Hereward Wake. His upbringing close to the Pennines, Snowdonia and the Lake District (where his Grammer school made annual walking and climbing expeditions and where he later lived for two years), gave him an early taste for these wilderness places.

In his distinctive style where he distorts and uses multiple perspectives to ‘open up’ and ‘enhance’ the ‘beholders’ view, his work invites you to explore a verity of paths, dead ends, multiple tracks or a way of escape over the horizon. Colour is an important feature of Robert’s work and he strikes boldly with brush and knife to create his pictures.

In subsequent years he also explored many of Englands long distance footpaths. Inevitably perhaps all these influences led to a pre-occupation with landscape. He now has his studio in a salubrious corner of Kettering.

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” Most of my work has evolved from walking, drawing, observing and dreaming about places. The painting comes from the combination of two elements -‘the real’ through drawings or photographs and ‘the imaginative.’ The latter aspects of the work developed through the imagination and the distortions of memory are by far the most important, the rest being really only a starting point.”

Robert Mercer  22nd January 1933 – 10th April 2012

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“Where you are,
who you are,
who you know
makes a lot of difference to the way you are disposed to make art.”

R. Hughes