Artwork Description
Walter Robinson – Four Seasons (Autumn)
Dimensions: 57 x 74.2 x 3.5” framed
Year: 2013
Medium: acrylic on panel
Walter Robinson’s unique Paint By Number clown paintings is a series that began after he had a dream about painting a paint by number painting that was all shades of red. At the time he was taking care of his elderly mother who had dementia. She told him that she invented a new shade of red to give her grandson for his wedding. Robinson believes that this is what triggered his dream. Once he made the first painting (Summer), he recognized that the melancholy clown represented his own feelings about aging and death. On some level, that first painting was a kind of psychological self-portrait. From there he decided to create a quartet of seasons, portraying different kinds of loss, longing and regret. Spring is the cheerful exception—maybe because Spring has something to do with rebirth and renewal? For Robinson there was something powerful about taking such a cliched, populist medium like a paint by number, and infusing it with ambiguous meaning and feeling.
Working in a range of media—wood, epoxy, metal, leather, and found materials—Walter Robinson, the Santa Fe based artist, hand-fabricates and assembles objects, signage and tableaux. Through his work, Robinson explores the mechanics of cultural and social anthropology. Using text and the strategies of appropriation, conflation, and dislocation, he investigates the subconscious and biological human imperatives hidden beneath social, political, religious, and capitalist packaging.
Robinson’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA; Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA, and in numerous group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; and the Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, CA. Recently, Walter’s works have been exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe. His work has received critical attention from a number of print and online publications, including Artforum, ArtReview, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Juxtapoz, the San Francisco Chronicle, THE Magazine and artpractical.com. An alumnus of the M.F.A. program at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, CA, he also studied at California College of Arts and Crafts, and San Francisco Academy of Art. In 2014, Robinson moved from San Francisco to Lamy, New Mexico. His artwork is represented by Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, Robischon Gallery in Denver, CO, Visions West Contemporary, Bozeman, MT, and by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA