FIGURATIVE: PEOPLE

The first image shown is a self- portrait done in the late seventies. It revealed to me,
my developing style of Realism. I was not thinking of anything except looking into a mirror and trying to capture what I saw. The exaggerated forms were there, naturally and unintended.

Figurative work became more interesting and powerful as I incorporated it into more complicated compositions. I gradually learned how to use it.

FIGURATIVE: ANIMALS

I didn’t have the urge to paint animals very often. The Dog image and the Dog Leading
Sheep image were two times that I was quite compelled to, due to the circumstances.

STILL LIFE

I always enjoyed doing still life work. It gave me the opportunity to build the composition, using all the ideas I had about making Art. It also gave the opportunity to juxtapose different objects with different textures, a new and enjoyable challenge. On top of that, choosing various objects to combine, gave me the chance to suggest levels of meaning.
A painting could be ironic, humorous, or “meaningful” just from the choice of, and placement of objects.

LANDSCAPE

I was, at first, for some reason intimidated by Landscape, and it would appear as background. I was asked to do Landscapes quite often however, and I not only lost my fear, but came to enjoy them.

ARCHITECTURE

The mostly hard edges of Architecture always had an appeal, but most of the pieces
were commissioned. Nevertheless, I always welcomed the opportunity.

SHUTTLE SERIES

In 1986 when I met my future wife, and after she saw my work, she introduced me to Dr. Robert Stevenson, NASA’s oceanographer. She worked for him at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where he received all the images coming back from the shuttle astronauts. Many of the images were spectacular to me as abstract compositions, and I made this series of paintings based on those images.

FLORAL SERIES

After the shuttle series, I was craving bright colors. I thought back to the Cardiff series and came up with a way to make bold colorful compositions within the realm of realism. I arranged jumbles of flowers, photographed them from various angles, and came up with a series of shallow depth paintings. The first I did with acrylic paint. I then blocked them in with acrylic, but switched to oil for the finished painting. This provided me the opportunity to make sure that where any color met another, that meeting was blended. This added a huge amount of work to finish each painting, but gave me the softness I wanted.

In 1971, several older artists encouraged Robert to move to New York.

His first trip there was with a friend. During that time, he sublet the studio of Manny Farber, and both were doing some work for Jack Beal. While there, he met Chuck Close, who was working one floor below Beal’s loft on what would become his first oversized portraits. He was already deeply impressed by Beal’s paintings from the 1960s, in which figures and abstract elements were combined into powerful and vividly colored compositions.

His exploration of realism began in earnest in 1976. On a trip east, he visited Beal at his upstate New York farm, where Beal had built a studio to undertake a major commission. He was preparing to begin work on four monumental canvases, each measuring 12 by 12 feet, commissioned by the General Services Administration. In celebration of the United States Bicentennial, a number of artists had received grants to produce public artworks. Beal’s project was an allegorical history of labor in the United States, intended for installation in the Department of Labor building in Washington, D.C. What began as a visit turned into a year-long stay, during which he assisted with the project.

That experience marked the beginning of his own sustained exploration of realism. Many of the elements that had already interested him remained central, but the work now incorporated a deeper engagement with spatial composition. Color relationships became even more significant as he developed his approach. His own version of realism continued to evolve after he returned to the West Coast.

At the same time, realism was beginning to re-emerge in the broader art world. This resurgence was reflected in exhibitions such as Contemporary American Realism at the Palm Springs Desert Museum, which surveyed the diverse realist practices that had developed in the late twentieth century.