Rob Colman
/biography
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My work has shifted back and forth between figurative and abstract painting, which is not so unusual among contemporary artists. In recent years I’m pulled more strongly toward abstraction. Even in my figurative works abstract elements appear and often tend to dominate. There’s a certain comfort or familiarity with figurative painting, where there’s a clear subject in mind from beginning to end. There’s more freedom but less certainty in abstract work, which is an exercise in orchestrated ambiguity. You don’t know where you’re going till you get there -if you get there.
I didn’t really connect with ART until my early 20’s, which is kind of late.. That connection with art began in a roundabout way. Back then I had an interest in Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions and while I was pouring through his sketch books I unexpectedly “encountered” his line drawings of people and animals and things in motion. Some of these were merely scratches or “squiggles” on the page, but his simple lines captured force, energy, direction, balance …in a way that was uncanny to me. How could da Vinci do that? How could he get the viewer to experience the exertion and power and focal point of a man swinging an ax -all in a simple line? I felt a need to figure that out. That was what hooked me. After a lifetime of drawing, I’m still trying to figure it out. I am sure that da Vinci’s early influence is the reason I rely heavily on line in much of my abstract work.
There’s a simplistic formula for creating art: "See and Do." You observe a subject, or you visualize a subject in your head. You react, and then you attempt to express that reaction. Expression involves technique, but it’s more than technique. Its technique informed by seeing properly, which means seeing what’s essential, grasping what it was in that subject that made you react in the first place.
Catching that first unencumbered impulse, whether toward a real object or an imagined one, is key to a strong painting. Picasso said something about this. He said the beginning of the painting is everything. Lose touch with that initial reaction and the painting goes nowhere. (Of course, on a different day he could have said the opposite.) So the idea is to move from reaction to painting to reaction to painting – back and forth. If you’re lucky the process takes on a life of its own. If it stalls you have to coax it into coming back.
Many things influence your work: the light, the weather, the last conversation, the dozen unfinished works laying around calling to you. You try to have a deliberate plan. But after you enter the studio and pick up the brush you don’t know what will happen. But it usually happens…thankfully.
Wellesley MA., Aug. 2022
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