Pictures From an Imaginary Exhibition
Some readers of My Father's Ghost have asked about Robin's artwork: after all, on the evidence he spent most of his life painting, reading about painting, and thinking about painting, so this is a reasonable inquiry.
He also destroyed vast numbers of paintings and drawings on multiple occasions, so what I have left now fills a couple of portfolios. I've made a selection, shown below, and I leave it to you, the visitor, to decide the value of this small sample of the work he devoted his life to.
None of these pictures is larger than about double the dimensions of a sheet of typing paper; Robin either worked very large (the lost masterpiece that covered the center of his loft floor) or small, with nothing in between (the size of your average modern painting in a museum, for instance).
When I look at these, I see obvious influences. Numbers 4, 5, and 6 seem to be modeled on some color works of Mark Rothko, and 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, and 9 are further developments in abstraction + color. I love the look of 9, myself. All of this series are done in pastels on black paper, which sounds like a recipe for disaster (Elvis on black velvet), but I think the pieces work very well.
16 is also pastels, and is a sketch of the interior of a half-demolished building with the skin of one side-wall removed so that the interior colors of abandoned apartment rooms are exposed like cells in a diagram. I used to see these when rows of old brownstone tenements were torn down (they don't tear them down any more, I hear -- there's always some new-rich kid around to pay for a rehabilitation to restore these places to an elegance many of them never had in the first place). This is a sketch for a painting; I remember that Pop had a number like this in his loft at one time. This is the only survivor. You can see the staircases slanting through the interior of the wreck.
10 is one of a series of pigment on paper that I think represents Robin's dalliance with "Action painting" -- the Grand Gesture made with paint. 11, 12, 13, and 18 show an evolution (maybe -- or it might have gone in the other direction) through an abstraction style that reminds me of Motherwell, Kline, et al. 14 is another gesture painting, and it shows up pretty poorly here, as does 15, a more formal and clear-cut abstraction.
17 is a self-portrait in water color.
19 is an example of Robin's illustrative style, a sketch for an illustration for a book called "The Shy Little Horse and other stories". 20 shows his cartooning style; he did sell a few cartoons when he was a young man.
21, the tiger, is a pencil drawing, a small experiment in the power of chiaroscuro.
— Suzy McKee Charnas
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