Robert Devoe

Art Brokerage: Robert Devoe American Artist was born July 21, 1933, in Canyonville, Oregon. A dozen years ago when I first became quite serious about being a painter, I was obsessed by light and the desire to be accurate and complete in rendering its effects. It seemed to me at this time that I was responding to and celebrating the concrete beauties of nature. I still do paintings in watercolor that can easily be classified as "photorealistic" and that feature the quiet drama of light and shadow, but I'm no longer so sure that nature is my real inspiration. Instead, recently I've begun to suspect that I'm willing to spend hours doing carefully detailed still lifes and landscapes not so much because I love the pots and flowers or the trees and mountains that I'm painting as because the paintings that result remind me of other paintings that I love: paintings by Constable, or Inness, or Bierstadt,or Degas, or Vermeer, or......Not that I'm arrogant enough to claim peer status with even the least of such models but that, as I'm coming to realize, the beauty that inspires me most is the beauty of art, not nature. It seems especially clear to me that when I do impressionistic pieces adapted from video images, I am (mostly unconsciously) trying to capure the feeling of a Manet, or Renoir, or Cassat. So I have discovered that despite the fact that my painting process shamelessly uses the most current technical devices: photography, projection, airbrush, and recently even computer-manipulated images, my aesthetics are very traditional. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I love the idea of being part of a tradition, a centuries-long enterprise of search for beauty and meaning in which the humblest of us can labor, and hope from time to time to recognize in our own small contributions a distant echo, a reflected glint of what's most authentic and profound in human experience. Paintings wanted by Art Brokerage.