Robert Lobe
Robert Lobe · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Acrylic Paint, Oil Paint, Paper
- Based in
- Astoria, Queens; Long Island City studio
- Practice
- Collage, Mixed Media, Painting, Photography, Works on Paper
Robert Lobe is a painter and photographer based in Astoria, Queens who maintains a studio in Long Island City. Lobe came to color photography in the late 1970s from a painting tradition. After receiving a master's degree… Full biography
Biography
Robert Lobe is a painter and photographer based in Astoria, Queens who maintains a studio in Long Island City. Lobe came to color photography in the late 1970s from a painting tradition. After receiving a master's degree in art history from Brown University, Lobe studied drawing and painting in RISD's Provincetown summer program and at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. Lobe's subsequent studies in color photography included classes at the International Center of Photography and independent workshops with master color printers Jerry Vezzuso and Mark Roussel. Since 2015 Lobe has intensified his painting and drawing practice, enriching it with classes taught by Graham Nickson, John Lees, Peter Bonner, and Josette Urso. Lobe has exhibited his color photographs at the University of Rhode Island, Soho Photo Gallery, and the 2012 Queens Museum biennial. His paintings have been included in recently curated exhibitions at Flushing Town Hall and the Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City.
Artist statement
PAINTING & MIXED MEDIA
My painting and mixed media works develop through a process of exploration. They are imaginative surfaces that use the language of painting - form, color, space, gesture - to create personal works. The process is open, active, and non-linear, coming more from an inner place of emotion, intuition, and memory than from direct observation. These works may suggest situations, landscapes, figures in movement, even fantastical creatures. Such connections are not created intentionally. Rather they are allowed to emerge over the course of developing work. A piece is finished when it comes alive for me and feels right in its emotional and aesthetic aspects. All parts have come into a proper relationship and it seems there is nothing to be changed.
PHOTOGRAPHY
My color photographs are based on close observation of street-level details to which people typically pay little attention. But such urban fragments, extracted from their context and presented as worthy photographic subjects, can reveal unexpected beauty, mystery, and meaning. The richly layered and textured surfaces of these photographs attest to the restless energies and perpetual reinvention of New York and other great cities. My work in photography relates to street and documentary photography but also references general modern art traditions including abstract painting, expressionism, and collage.
