Inspired by his father, an architect who enjoyed painting, and his mother, a reading specialist who loved craft projects, Robert grew up drawing fanciful pictures and reading picture books and classic stories. Creating and reading became his two life-long interests. In college he formalized those interests by majoring in both Studio Arts and English. There he trained in traditional drawing, painting, and sculpture and gained an in-depth knowledge of art and architectural history. Since then, Robert has worked primarily as a high school English teacher (and occasional art teacher) whose students enjoy his (sometimes elaborate) drawings that illustrate literary concepts or his classes’ engaging discussions or assignments analyzing visual media from pop culture. He has always been interested in the relationships between visual imagery and literary expression.
I have always been interested in the imaginative ways carefully crafted works of art can make the airy world of ideas into a physical (or seemingly tangible) reality, whether those ideas are fantastic, philosophical, or conceptual. The work I create falls into two primary genres of artistic expression, illustration or abstract sculpture. Although very different media with different purposes, both allow me to explore the boundaries between seemingly antithetical concepts or elements of experience by combining or juxtaposing them. My compositions do this in part by framing and controlling the way the viewer perceives space and light.
Ever since I was a child, I have always loved the worlds of dramatic color, action, and emotion that spring from the written words on a page. And I admire artists who combine realistic, vivid detail with fantasy and imagination to bring those worlds to life. Some illustrators whose influence has stuck with me are Gustave Dore, Arthur Rackham, N. C. Wyeth, Chris Van Allsburg, David Wiesner, Jan Brett, and Jerry Pinkney. I strive to create dynamic compositions in a traditional style (rather than cartoon, anime, or manga, for instance) that dramatize space and light for maximum effect on the viewer. I use pencil or ink to crisply delineate the contours of objects and figures and a combination of watercolors and colored pencil to create light effects. Whether I am creating an image of a thrifty, resourceful mother working magic in the kitchen for a children’s book (See Magician in the Kitchen) or a disturbing, hyperbolic commentary on children’s online vulnerability in a predatory adult and corporate society today (See Naked), I aim to provoke thought and evoke feeling by merging concrete realism with fantastic vision.
Resulting from my love of architecture and study of Buddhist philosophy, my sculptural works explore the subtle, paradoxical relationships between seemingly contradictory aspects of life, human society, and the natural world. They invite the viewer to question dichotomies such as those between exterior and interior space, industrial and organic material, containment and liberation, obtrusiveness and receptivity, rigidity and movement.
They do this mainly by contrasting and integrating industrial manufactured materials like plywood, plastic, and metal with natural, organic found materials like leaves, jute, and feathers. Man-made materials are used to form a frame or enclosure, and natural materials are arranged with impasto to create a collage. The 3-dimensional “paintings” or painted sculptures likewise blur the categories between painting and sculpture, especially those hung on a wall with an oversized “frame” becoming a dominant and integral part of the piece as it constrains the freedom and wildness of the natural world or animal impulses within (See Icarus and Hortus Conclusus, for example).
The overall forms of the structures draw from the minimalist movement in general. Yet the emotive and subjective works of Egon Schiele, Jackson Pollock, and other abstract expressionists, against which minimalists rebelled, also influenced my pieces, primarily in the coarse, intricate movement of impastoed collage. Other specific influences are Anselm Kiefer and Andy Goldsworthy, who employed materials like lead, straw, tar, and sand or living matter like grass, leaves, and flowers in their works; and Lee Bontecou, whose sculpture likewise “straddles the lines between painting and sculpture, mechanical and organic, and inviting and threatening.”* Drawing from these sources, my sculptures strive to provoke thought and feeling from the viewer with a dramatic, imaginative combination of seemingly antithetical elements.
* “Lee Bontecou: Untitled, 1961.” MoMA. 2022. Museum of Modern Art. Gallery Label from “Collection 1940s-1970s” Exhibit, 2019. Accessed 23 Oct 2022. <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81442>
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