Doren Robbins

Doren Robbins
Santa Cruz, California, USA

STATEMENT

I am not an Art School graduate. I was taught artistic fundamentals by my brother, the artist and art teacher, Gary Robbins. Beyond those years of practice and fantasy beginning in childhood, I am autodidact. After serious study of international traditions in art, then cubism and DADA, I focused on
German Expressionist and Surrealist traditions of fusing the dream, verisimilitude, and indeterminacy into works of fine art, collage, photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media representations. I further derived my insights from many of the artists discussed and represented in artist-and-subject-specific exhibits and catalogues of exhibitions, including Dawn Ades’ Photomontage, Hans Richter’s Dada: art and anti-art, Herta Wescher’s book Collage, Robert Motherwell’s The DADA Painters and Poets. For me, as with all artists, interiority is implicit, but artists that include history and the common people in their fantasies of representation are essential; for example, Goya, Picasso, Soutine, Kollwitz, Bearden, Patchen, George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, and Kara Walker. In part, to me the fantasy is in the euphoria or concentrated passion of arrangement, coloration, figures, shapes, and the directing emotion. An attempt to present in the images an incident of imagination, attraction, allurement, a type of imponderable intensity.

BIO

Doren Robbins is a poet and artist from Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, California. Over the years, he has created collages, photomontages, ink drawings, watercolors, assemblages, sculptures, and mixed media works separately, and as simultaneous expressions accompanying his poems. Many of the publications, videos, and exhibitions with Robbins’ artwork include the following venues: The Ontological Museum New Acquisitions Catalog 2020; Center for the Study of Political Graphics; Another Chicago Magazine; Cholla Needles; Consequence; The Ontological Museum New Acquisitions Catalog 2019; Third Rail, International Literature and Arts; Otoliths (several issues); Red Wheelbarrow, a Journal of Poetry and Art (several issues); Caliban (several issues); Empty Mirror; The Houston Literary Review; Pensive; The Signature of All Things (Kenneth Rexroth Documentary); Exhibition for Paterson Review. Exhibited at “Crossing Boundaries: Visual; Art by Writers”. The Paterson Museum, Paterson, New Jersey, 2006; Poetsagainstthewar.org (Fundraising Poster-Poem)

ARTIST CONTACT

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dorenrobbins.wordpress.com/selected-art-works/

IMAGES