Robin Stearns

Robin Stearns's picture
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Recently, I’ve focused on creating "interactive painting experiences." My first is “Perspectives,” and includes four original oil paintings and three High Fidelity’s 3D virtual worlds. It is displayed on a beautiful 55 inch touch screen monitor that allows you to interact, explore, and have an intimate experience with the artwork! The goal is to create an experience that allows you to see a painting, and then step into that painting, to become a part of it! While the experience is more tactile and complete if you experience it using an Oculus, the touch screen let’s you feel the effect almost effortlessly. Touch the items in my studio, and they come to life. Touch the paintings, and experience a 3D world. Use your fingers to guide your avatar around these 3D worlds. You may even meet other avatars in world!

Perspectives was featured in Commemorating Old and New, an article about Gallery House on Palo Alto Online.

I deconstruct my cityscrapes using rollers and knives, scrapers and sponges, to blend ugly into beauty, until each piece becomes a story about the light and the motion and the energy of the city. There is something magical that occasionally happens, when all the stars align, when the paint does the work and and makes the image appear. When I create my cityscrapes, I’m not so much painting, as setting up opportunities for the paint to make magic. Using cradled wood panels, gessoed three times and sanded smooth, I measure out and delineate the geometry of the street scene I’m recreating. I start applying layer after layer of resist and paint, using rollers and palette knives, then scraping the excess away with a squeegee. Each application carves out more structures, darkening shadows, enhancing the geometry, eliminating as much of the unnecessary information as possible. When the piece reaches a density, a solidity, that feels true, I add in the characters, the cars, the trees, painting these details with a brush, then blending them into the background with a roller.

My figures are generally focused on beautiful people facing ”challenges.” The beauty of the subject is always challenged by the underlying “problem”, but the strength of the subject perseveres and the message becomes one of hope.