Do you have any early memories of being interested in the arts?
The neighbourhood where I was born, and where I grew up, was made up of the old Glasgow four storey, sandstone, tenements. My dad was a bricklayer and mum worked in a factory so they were never home. I spent a lot of time at my granny’s place and out the back of her house, as far as the eye could see, was the steelworks, Ravenscraig, which you could hear clanging away, and there would be smoke and steam, 24 hours a day.

The process of making steel produces a red dust which you would see everywhere. It lay on the ground, it lay on the washing, the women learned to wash clothes at a particular time of day to avoid the dust clinging to their clothes, and I can remember making drawings in the red dust on the pavements when I was a little boy. That’s my earliest memory of being, in some way, artistic.
What about school?
I learned I was colour blind at school and that made me very hesitant in terms of using colour or doing anything with paint. That was an unfortunate development in primary school.
When I went to high school there were lots of gangs and it was very rough, quite dangerous, and each day was an ordeal, so I took refuge in the art department. Mr Lennox was the art teacher and Johnny Stretford was the technical drawing teacher. I had never done anything like those subjects but I loved both of those classes. I took to technical drawing; I loved the instruments that you used and I loved the sense of planning and of creating. When I went to the arts classes I just felt that was where I could play.
That was around the time I got into music as well. I would go to my other classes; I would often sit quietly in the class and read Melody Maker and think about music; all the great bands which were around at that time. There was lots of colour and sound, psychedelic sounds. This was the late 60’s and everything seemed to come from London, it seemed very far away, a place you could never get to, but it is somewhere which becomes very important later on.
So you got some support at school?
In a way, but when I was growing up, you really weren’t given many choices as to what you could achieve. We were expected to follow the members of your family into the steelworks, or work on the docks, or go into coal mining, and there was absolutely no sense that you could do anything else. You were expected to go where real men would work, and that was it. There were no other choices. The notion of wanting to go to art school was just not something anyone around me could contemplate.
I ended up going to London when I was very young. I had nothing to keep me in Glasgow, I had no brothers or sisters, life there was very monochrome, it was generally grey and dull. But London, it was just full of life. I was 20 in 1970 and the early 70’s brought an explosion of great music, venues and the arrival of the LP record and sleeve design.

I was fascinated by the work of HipGnosis and Roger Dean who created many of the iconic images on the album covers for Pink Floyd, Yes and many others, and for me, Dark Side of the Moon was a game changer.
What happens in London?
For the first 6-9 months I was living a very precarious existence, squatting, sleeping here there and everywhere. Luckily, I ended up working in an architect’s office in the print room. Mostly I delivered the prints of the plans to the architects and delivering to building site.
One day I walked into a room in the building where the interior designers worked and it was really colourful, and I met a young man who was also from Glasgow and we became friends. He had studied art in Glasgow and he knew what he was doing, and when I told him that I loved arts and technical drawing at school, he decided to help me learn about interior design. And they set me up with a drawing board and I went about learning what that job required.
Eventually people complained about me not being in the print room and the Director called me into his office and when I told him that I was doing work in the interior design department he suggested that I stay there. He said they would get a new print boy and I was to work in the Interior Design Department permanently
What happened then?
That changed everything for me, and I was in that department for a year or so. After that year, they said that they couldn’t teach me any longer because they had taught me as much as they could, and they suggested I should go to Art School.
I didn’t think I would get into an art college, because I had left high school without any qualifications, but they set up a portfolio with my work in it and they wrote a letter of recommendation for an interview with Chelsea College of Art. I got in and I spent three years learning about Interior Design and Environmental Design.

See more of Colin Robertson’s work here: colinrobertsonart.com