Get Off My Back Will You, acrylic on canvas

David Robilliard is an artist based in London. A self-taught artist and poet, Robilliard often combines image and text in his works, with each language informing the other.

Nature of the Beast, acrylic on canvas

I like the way the artist gives equal weight to image and text in his pieces. The artist uses a lot of negative space and tends to draw in a kind of naive style, scrawling text liberally around and across the image in a manner similar to Jim Joe. The resulting aesthetic seems narrative and often slightly comedic in nature, a direct reference to the thoughts and feelings experienced by the artist.

Robilliard is known for his poetry, which has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines over the years, as well as on postcards that the artist himself used to mail out in the 1980s. In the late 70s, Robilliard collaborated with Gilbert and George.

Untitled, watercolour on paper