Robin Adsit
Each week on our News Blog we release features on two of our Paradice Palase member, spotlighting their practice and involvement in the arts community. This week, we had the chance to hear from Robin Adsit, a painter and teacher currently based out of Southern California. Robin’s paintings caught our attention by merging a classical figurative influence with unique spatial orientations to create a wholly captivating style. A bit more about Robin:
Robin Adsit received her B.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute with an emphasis in painting and drawing. She went on to complete an M.A. in Painting and Drawing from San Francisco State University, and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University. Robin’s paintings and drawings have appeared in numerous national and regional exhibitions and include, most recently: ChaShaMa, “Romancing Sustainability: Figuring Change ,” New York, “Ordinary Life in Unusual Times,” Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT, “Portraits and Identity,” SITE: Brooklyn, “Breaching the Margins” at the Urban Institute of Art, MI, among many others. Adsit has also been an artist-in-resident and grant recipient, and is currently a lecturer at CSU San Bernardino where she teaches painting, drawing and life drawing.
While at Ohio State University, Robin received a grant to travel to Spain to study the works of Diego Velazquez, Fransisco Goya, and Francisco de Zubaran, among others.
Underbelly, 2020
PP: Where are you currently living/ working and what are you working on?
RA: I am currently living and working in Southern California, outside of Los Angeles. I teach at California State University San Bernardino and due to the pandemic I was teaching from home so it was easier for me to also have a studio at home, so when I wasn’t teaching I have easy access to painting. Teaching studio art online and through zoom was much more time consuming but at least I didn’t have the commute anymore. I have continued to incorporate the figure into my paintings but have become more interested in the relationship of the figure to structural, abstract shapes and space, almost a spatial disruption or dislocation that allows a foregrounding of the slippage between observation and illusion. I usually work large so I am also trying to create some small, quick works that are more spontaneous.
PP: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your creative practice?
RA: Primarily my work has been influenced by internal dialogues, personal histories, literature, feminist movements and theories and the desire to observe my surroundings but I’m sure years of teaching, research and looking at other artists’ work has also played a role in the development of my work both materially and conceptually. Throughout my career I also have been motivated by what others have said can’t or shouldn’t be done in art or painting/drawing. It always feels like a challenge and I’ve always wanted to push back against that. This includes painting the figure when it was out of fashion in the art world and creating work with challenging content.
A Faint Blaze in Half Dark, 2020
PP: Your work consistently features figurative influences, how did you become interested in the human form and why?
RA: Early in my career I was influenced by Bay Area figurative artists like Joan Brown and I took classes with Judith Linhares at the San Francisco Art Institute. Then during my MA at San Francisco State I gravitated to painting objects and light, and the way light transforms an object and helps develop a sense depth and atmosphere. I began my love of figures and the body at the end of graduate school at The Ohio State University. I was drawn to a group of Renaissance and Baroque painted depictions of the Virgin Martyrs in Catholicism by Francisco de Zubaran and others. I was awarded a travel grant where I proposed to travel through Spain to study the religious paintings of Francisco de Zubaran and El Greco. I also was interested in studying the painting techniques and content of Diego Velasquez and Francisco Goya. It was a month long, transformative trip starting in Madrid, south to Toledo and the southern coast of Spain, over to Barcelona, then north to San Sebastian and back to Madrid. I was transfixed but the luminosity of their oil paintings, so I taught myself how to paint using traditional oil glazes but using contemporary figures and experiences in the work. I started with naturalistic colors but love all the varieties of colors in bodies when you look closely at the skin, muscles, fat, hair, etc., and changed my color palate to capture the transparency of skin and layers of structure in the body. Presently, I make paintings of figures linked through sight, intention, and proximity that look at human bodies as archives, with a focus on body language as a signifier of class, power, longing, desire and absence. I have always been interested in beginning my paintings and drawings from observation, looking at flesh, light, shadow, muscles, skin, body position and understanding how careful observation can create desire but also removal. My paintings present an interrelated collection of figural and material gestures and spaces whose meaning is determined by their relationship to each other.
PP: What body or piece of work of yours is your favorite, or the most meaningful to you?
RA: Usually, the piece I am working on is my favorite at the time. I enjoy the process and the struggle to move the paint and image together into something that resonates. Currently, I have been interweaving figural representations with spatial disruptions and/or dislocations to create a dissonance between the body, representation and the mediated image. I do have some older works that would be impossible to part with that are more personal. My mother lived with me at the end of her life and she had Alzheimers. It was very difficult to see someone you love and respect lose a sense of their self, their core. She graduated from UC Berkeley and was extremely smart, loving and funny. We were very close but became more dependent on each other when my father died when I was 15. After she passed I began a series on cloning that explored who we are and the role both genetics and lived experience has on our identity. I painted a large watercolor of four life sized, standing portraits of my mom with slight variations in each.
PP: What role do you think artists have in society?
RA: I think artists can have an important role simply by showing us, the audience a new, unique way of seeing or experiencing the world. I wish the art world hadn’t become so entrenched in the consumer and material culture of art fares and art auction markets but I think there is room for all types of art and artists. Personally, I am most interested in art that pushes boundaries and challenges cultural, social and political norms and structures.
A Body Halfway In and Out of, 2019
Reduced Visibility Ahead, 2018