Home Digital Painting Sculpture Drawing About Contact
Robert Chapman

About the Artist

Robert Chapman
Biography

Born in Santa Monica, California in 1950, Robert Chapman has lived and worked in Maryland, Bridgehampton NY, the Central Coast of California, San Miguel de Allende Mexico, and now Santa Fe, New Mexico. His practice began in the early 1970s and has continued without pause across more than five decades, taking in wood sculpture, oil painting, charcoal drawing, pastel, copper metalwork, sumi ink, and digital work.

Chapman spent a decade as an assistant to Willem de Kooning, which he has described as the equivalent of a PhD in painting, if one existed, or an apprenticeship with Rembrandt. He was already well along his own path by then and made the most of that experience.

His early career established him in figurative drawing and realism, where the technical demands are high and the margin for error is small. The life-sized charcoal nudes from the early 1990s, some as tall as seven feet, belong to the tradition of academic draftsmanship. Running alongside the figurative work, and preceding it in some cases, was an abstract practice that refused to behave the way abstract painting usually does. Chapman has always insisted on establishing a light source within his non-representational work, an unusual commitment that gives his abstracts a dimensional weight most painters in that mode don't attempt.

The pastel series of the late 1990s and 2000s brought mythological and ritualistic subject matter rendered in a medium that softens edges while his intentions got larger. More recently, Chapman has worked in large-format digital compositing, building one to two images a day through a process of layered scanned brushwork, printed collage elements, and mouse-drawn marks. He has accumulated over 3,200 master files since starting the practice around 2015.

Wood sculpture has run as a through-line since 1976. He works with the material's own structure, not against it, reading knot formations, following grain, sometimes abandoning hand tools entirely for grinders when the wood demands it.

Artist Statement
By using an open artistic form of expression, one made by balancing chance occurrence with reason-driven intent, the opportunity may occur to access a sense of that unseen parallel side of objectivity. Being in flux as an artwork develops, what is sometimes revealed helps me, and hopefully the viewer, to perceive if only symbolically what takes place in the development of chance randomness forming and affecting a unified whole. An event suggested not only by what takes place within the work of art, but also by the relationships found in what represents order in the natural world.R. Chapman, 2008
Critical Writing
What truly individuates Robert's work lies in the way his paintings inspire one to look with fresh eyes at the natural elements in our own everyday environment. He is the perfect package: a one-of-a-kind amalgam, produced by all of the influences, stages, and styles passed through in the course of his development. In Robert, it is the push-pull of that seeming ambivalence and ambiguity, embraced with a deep-seated love of nature, processed intuitively, that produces lyrical abstractions striking a universal chord, while avoiding vapid narrative and eschewing cloying, derivative appeal.Dr. Jeanne LaBarbera, PhD. Exhibition essay, 2011
Former Gallery Representation

Robert has been represented by the following galleries over the course of his career. He is not currently affiliated with any gallery.

Museum Collections
Commissions

Robert accepts a limited number of commissions each year. Every commission begins with a conversation about the work, the space, and what it needs. Get in touch →