“Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.”
Henri Rousseau

Robert Palmer is influenced by nature and surroundings. His paintings are more than landscapes physically seen, rather imaginative or a reflection of feeling on a space remembered. His paintings are reminiscent of the past; capturing a moment in time to preserve a memory. Robert has taken out the figure in the painting, leaving the viewer a stage to focus in the plane. This transcendence from imaginative nature to reality is definitive in his work. The viewer is transported to an imaginative state from the canvas into nature. While the works look like natural places, they are really born from ethereal memories. For over 20 years Robert has worked to capture the aesthetic and conceptual mastery of nature. Although nature is difficult to construct in one painting, Robert seeks to tell a story of infinite locations, drawn by the constant changing emanating celestial light. One of Roberts sources for inspiration comes from where the intangible horizon line meets with the sky and land. There is an obscurity to the separation of land and sky coming together in view that puts depth and scale to the picture. Here you can see the artistic evolution as representational and expressionistic styles come together in contemporary work to define nature.
Roberts recent oil paintings display thick layered paint. It is an inherent study of nature. In Forrest he captures the mosaic shapes created by the cerulean blue sky framed by the trees and landscape. The fragmented space opens a window to the background. This is also represented in Arbor, Speculum Lacum. and Somnaire Aquea as Robert uses fractured layers of paint to represent the foreground and background in these motifs. This style caries on throughout his oil paintings.
In the series Reflections I-X we see the conceptual art take form and expression take hold. Robert uses watercolors in the series experimenting with dry brush technique overlaid with wet into wet washes to fill the voids left behind. The end result yields interesting chaotic marks of transparent and opaque paint on the surface. Similarly, in the series of Sketches of Landscape I-IX, the artist experiments with dry and heavily loaded brushes on the ground, while a wet into wet technique is used to fill the sky with ephemeral clouds. The two techniques are separated, but come together capturing earth and atmospheric perspective in nine compositions as he attempts to capture the grandeur of this world.
Robert graduated sum cum laude from ASU with a bachelors degree in Fine Art Painting. He has been featured in various publications. Recently he exhibited in a show at Gammage Auditorium in Tempe.