Tobit Roche’s latest exhibition, Painting India over Time, at The Art Stable, Dorset, is the seventh exhibition of his work at the gallery in its twenty-year history, and it represents the most focused and sustained engagement yet with the country that has shaped his practice more than any other.
Roche was born in Manchester in 1954 but grew up across several continents, spending his formative years in Hong Kong, Canada and India. It was India, and specifically the Himalayas and the landscapes encountered on journeys through Rajasthan’s Aravalli Range, that left the deepest impression.
“These memories have stayed with me,” he has said, “inspiring many subsequent visits, and not least turning India for me into a kind of spiritual home.” – TR
That sense of spiritual belonging is legible in the paintings, which approach landscape not as topography but as internal weather, an attempt to capture what he describes as something exotic, toxic, magical and sublime.
Tobit Roche First Alwar Landscape oil on linen 31 x 46 cm Photo Courtesy The Art Stable, Dorset
The exhibition brings together plein air paintings created in Nepal and Pakistan alongside remembered and reimagined studio works, a combination that reflects the dual methodology at the heart of his practice. When working outdoors, Roche uses a homemade pochade box worn on a shoulder sling, painting small panels approximately 7 by 9 inches that serve as rapid notations of light, temperature, and atmospheric conditions. These direct studies are not finished works but raw material, the sensory evidence from which larger paintings are subsequently built. In the studio, he constructs semi-transparent glazes over the image, working the oil paint with his hands and fingers as well as with brushes, a tactile process that gives the finished surfaces their distinctive quality of accumulated depth.
His formation as a painter was rich. He studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto between 1974 and 1976, where exposure to the Group of Seven, those painters of the Canadian wilderness whose work elevated landscape to near-mythic status, gave him an early model for what atmospheric painting could achieve. He then trained at Camberwell School of Art in London, before spending a year working alongside Duncan Grant at Charleston in East Sussex. This country house had served as the informal headquarters of the Bloomsbury Group. The influence of mid-century American Abstract Expressionism, particularly the spatial ambition of Mark Rothko and the physical energy of Jackson Pollock, also runs through his approach to surface and emotion.
Evening Light, Tobit Roche Patnem oil on linen 41 x 67 cm Photo Courtesy The Art Stable, Dorset
The collectors drawn to his work, among them David Bowie and Cate Blanchett, suggest an audience attuned to painting that operates through feeling rather than description. His more recent Lingam series, which moves between landscape and something closer to pure abstraction through the lens of tantric philosophy, indicates a practice still in active development.
His time is divided between India, London and St Leonards-on-Sea, where he lives and works.
Tobit Roche: Painting India over Time is at The Art Stable from 13 June to 10 July 2026