I need your vote!

 

My work is being reviewed at The Year in Review by Artists wanted.  I have selected 20 of my favorite works to be included in this online show.  If I get selected I can have a show in New York and invite you to come!  You can vote for my entry here at Year in Review.

Thank you.  
Robert

New Work Today!

Today is the big show at Lahaina Galleries and I am excited to see everyone.  If you are here on Maui, come down to Front Street in Lahaina between 1pm and 4pm and join the party!  Here are some of the paintings I will be showing along with a number of works on paper.  If you cannot get to the gallery, call Lahaina Galleries at (800) 228-2006 for more information on any of these paintings. Or go here to all available oil paintings.

The Visitor

Provenance

  The Dream

The Discord of Paris

The Clearing

The Vision

The Snowy Owl

Detail from The Dream by Robert Bissell, 2011, oil on canvas

I am reading this morning of the unusually large numbers of Snowy Owls that have been appearing in the United States as part of the normal irruption that takes place every few years.   These most beautiful owls are rarely seen in warm climates but this year one was spotted at the Honolulu airport and promptly shot for being a hazard to planes.  I am flying to Hawaii in a couple of days and was thinking of having a talking to the airport authorities there about their seemingly hasty action.  On second thoughts however, I realized that if one of these unfortunate birds ended up in my planes intake I would be relieved that the marksman for the FAA had done his job!

The Dream

   The Dream, 2012 30" x 56" oil on canvas

Recently I have embarked on a series of paintings that explore ideas of scale and gigantism. I find the questions that arise in creating the images to be interesting and more complex than might be imagined.  Giants have shown up in mythology, folklore and modern literature as either quite bad beings or as "gentle giants". Same goes for small beings, although to a lesser extent. Either way they are generally depicted as being different.  We also use the term giant to refer to creatures that excel in some way.  Issac Newton stated that he "....stood on the shoulders of giants" as he developed his theories.  Pictorially I realized that when combining different sized bears I was not always sure whether I was depicting normal sized bears with dwarf sized bears or normal sized bears with giant bears. This aspect I have decided to exploit so that we, as viewers are also unsure.  The painting above depicts a bear apparently waking up but I leave it to the viewer to decide who is having the dream.


I am curious what you might think of this painting as I am considering making this one available as a print?  Please let me know your thoughts.

December Newsletter

My latest Studio News has just been published.  You can read it here.  You can sign up for future editions here also.  Happy Holidays to all!

Drawing from the hand.

Recently I have been taking a break from painting and doing some sketching.  Here are some detail shots of some of them.  I always like to look at the detail of a pencil line or pastel mark in any artist's work as it seems to me that that is the closest point to where the creativity or energetic flow from the hand meets the paper.  If you can get close enough and remove the element of time, the mark on the paper and the action created in the hand become one and you can actually see the hand moving across the paper.  Looking at any of Leonardo's sketches  (the last one shown below),  500 years seems to disappear in an instant and I can feel like I am looking over his shoulder.  Which is what makes his genius become timeless to me.