At the Met there is a painting by John Frederick Kensett of Eaton’s Neck, Long Island. It is a small painting that portrayed an enormous emptiness. That emptiness pulls the viewer to the horizon and into an elegant void. My paintings are the antithesis of such a portrayal of our world. I portray the enormous multifarious complexity of the small and easily overlooked

patches of nature that are all around us. I paint the places that might easily be passed over, but when given your attention, allow you to real in their variety and complexity. They are small spaces portrayed in a large scale. They engulf the viewer, and the viewer must push their way through to the ground before them, and then the horizon.

 

Frondescence is a body of paintings that, through the portrayal of dense wooded areas, offers the viewer an immersive visceral experience. Once the viewer is inside the painting they may or may not discover that each piece contains many small ideas conveyed through various metaphors and relationships. Issues relating to acculturation, social and political conflict and compromise, resource management, suburban sprawl and the persistence of nature all become major themes in the works This group of works reflect on the temporal and memory aspects of passing through time, and travelling to and away from or through a space.

 

These paintings are about the ephemerality of sensory memory. They are about being in multiple states and places all at once. They are about the feeling of doing one thing while thinking

about something else. They are about being distracted and about noticing something small and unexpected. They are as much about what we forget as what we remember, and how

technology is changing how we remember.

 

My paintings express the feeling of simultaneously being in nature and separate from it. We can repeatedly slide through space in vehicles surrounded by the natural world while

completely isolated from any sensory experience of it.

 

This work explores the confluence and conflation of time, space, the natural world and the artificial world in our complicated lives.

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Robert Robbins is an internationally exhibited visual artist who explores issues of social, political and environmental conflict through landscape as subject. His art, which takes the form of

large-scale paintings, on the surface appears straight-forward, but on closer inspection leaves the viewer to contemplate their position in the world.

 

Robbins received his MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University and his BFA in Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design. His work has been awarded fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Robbins's work has been exhibited at the Butler Institute, The Chateau Museum (Rochefort-En-Terre), Springfield Museum of Art (OH), Sears / Peyton Gallery (NY), Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland, Lydon Fine Arts in Chicago, the Carnegie Center for the Visual Arts (KY), Morehead University,Florida State University, Cleveland State University and the Maryland Institute of Art, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Nord Family Foundation, the Columbus

Metropolitan Library and the Ohio State University.

 

Robbins is a Professor of Art and former Chair of the Art Department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.