During an expansive reconnaissance trip Clinch encountered an area on the Great Northern Highway known locally as ‘Moon-Rocks’. Here was a chance to pay homage to this formative imagery! During an intense month of painstaking plein-air drawing, across a seemingly barren vista, he gradually discovered endless, subtle signs of life.

The resulting heroic panorama, Life on Earth (2020), is not the first natural landscape in Robert’s oeuvre, nor will it be the last, but it has a title that, in all its permutations, could be aptly applied to all his work.

Clinch's images, although apparently real, are capriccios; realistic fictions. His reference is drawn from real-life (not photographs) and the complexity of design and invention, along with an exacting technique in a demanding medium, egg tempera, means he is not prolific. A number of the major works have, on their own, consumed between one and two years of his practice.