About

My paintings are my daydreams made visible. The themes I am exploring include nature’s perfection and time-tested life-support systems, the questions and answers posed in physics, and those quirky human relationships. Perhaps my painting themes could be called The Ecology of Life. The concept of ecology has fascinated me, since first learning about it in junior high school.

My paintings express my perspective. I hope that people viewing my work share their ideas and interpretations. Painting is a solitary experience; sharing the work creates new connections. There's that ecology thing again.

I began my artistic studies focusing on drawing and painting the figure. Prints of Renaissance drawings by Verrocchio (Leonardo's teacher) and Raphael on our NYC living room wall were some of my first artistic influences. I painted solely in a realist style for many years. Initially self-taught, I later supplemented my studies with figure drawing and artistic anatomy classes at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, as well as portrait painting and portrait sculpture courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In recent years, my work is an improvised mixture of realism, conceptual imagery, and abstract color design.

I work primarily in oil and acrylic paint. Some painting series include three-dimensional objects encased within the painting surface. Elements from the natural world appear, especially from my vegetable, flower, and herb garden. The color-rich organic elements from my garden reunite with the earth-mineral paint pigments.

One of my current painting series incorporates mass-produced design materials from the pre-digital era of graphic design. It is my way of keeping alive tools that still function as well as they did before design became a digital experience. I worked for several decades as a book, poster, and publications designer. In many of my paintings, the graphic designer’s eye collaborates with the painter’s eye.

I believe that creativity is as essential as breathing—one of the purest ways to observe life, relationships, imagination, logic, color, and the unexpected variations that life serves up now and then.

Some days in the studio, I feel like an investigative journalist, commenting on the invisible forces that shape our lives. On other days, my brushstrokes are free from observation and intention. Then I improvise like a musician, searching for a painted melody that both expands and complements reality.

Robert Gerson

California, 2026