In Conversation With: Rollo Skinner
Botanical set designer, illustrator, and writer.
We meet Rollo Skinner on a morning in early May, at the edge of the narrow strip of woodland that borders the house he grew up in — a place he describes, without a trace of affectation, as his territory of fantasy for decades. Wild garlic lines the path. Cow parsley rises in white drifts on either side. Somewhere below, a stream. And above it all, the ancient oaks — six hundred years old, he estimates. It feels like the right place to talk about finding your way back to yourself.
Rollo is a botanical set designer whose work has been shown at the Garden Museum, among other places. He also illustrates, writes, and has recently begun to paint in oils. A book, Creative Nature: A Compass for a Curious Life, is forthcoming with Doubleday. None of it, he is quick to say, arrived in a straight line.
He trained as an actor in his twenties, having been encouraged by a casting director who saw something in him. It was, he now understands, the wrong turn. “I should have gone to art school,” he says. “I never really listened to my own instincts.” Growing up gay, he explains, had taught him early to distrust those instincts — to treat his own responses as unreliable, his own desires as suspect. By the time he was eighteen, he had learned to navigate the world by other people’s maps. The effect compounded through his twenties, through drama school and into advertising, each wrong turn making the next one harder to correct. “It’s like when you’re driving,” he says, “and you take the first wrong turning, and then you keep taking more, trying to fix it, until eventually you have to stop, get out the map, and start again.”
That moment came at thirty. Burnt out, increasingly lost, he began asking himself a question he had been avoiding for years: what had he loved doing as a child? The answer came back clearly, and all at once. Drawing. Painting. Playing with flowers and making miniature fairy gardens for the village show. Writing little signs for the birds in the woods. “I thought I was the only person who felt that way,” he says. “About the natural world. That it was the one place where you could simply be yourself.”
He had been happy, he realised, at festivals — dancing barefoot in the mud, lost among trees — and had put it down to the festival rather than the landscape. It had taken him until thirty to understand what he had actually been reaching for.
Lockdown arrived at precisely that moment. He came back here, to this house, this woodland. He started working with plants and flowers and branches, feeling his way. “It all started to come from there,” he says simply.
The work that has grown from that return is harder to categorise than the title botanical set designer suggests. His aesthetic draws from what the English countryside quietly overlooks: dock leaves, cow parsley, brambles, the rusting reds and greens of things most people pull up and discard. For an installation at the Garden Museum he used dock flowers — great architectural stems, sculptural and strange — and two visitors walked the length of the piece without once recognising what they were looking at. “They didn’t know,” he says, with evident pleasure. “They just knew it was beautiful.”
The different strands of his practice — the flowers, the illustration, the writing, now the painting — don’t so much compete as quietly feed one another. Something noticed in the landscape finds its way into a sketch. A colour seen on a walk surfaces later in a sentence. Working with flowers, he says, is painterly in its instincts: quick, ephemeral, committed. “You place a few stems and suddenly you have this image — and it’s alive, and it’s gone.” He has recently begun working in oils for the first time, having always been afraid of them. The fear, it turns out, was unfounded. “I follow my curiosity,” he says. “That’s the only through-line I’ve ever found.”
We stop at the base of one of the great oaks. He is quiet for a moment. During lockdown, he says, whenever a difficult question arose — and there were many — he came here. He talked to this tree. He got answers. “I’m very serious about that,” he says. “These are not metaphors.”
The book grew from the same impulse: not quite a memoir, but rooted in his own experience of returning to the natural world as a way of returning to himself, and the hope that others might find their way there too. He had carried the idea for years. At some point he made a mood board, and almost on impulse placed a Penguin logo on it — a quiet declaration of intent, sent out into the world. “And somehow,” he says, “here we are.”
The oaks will outlast all of it, of course. He knows that too. He glances up at last, and we walk on.
Rollo Skinner is a botanical set designer, illustrator, and writer. His book, Creative Nature: A Compass for a Curious Life, is forthcoming from Doubleday.