ARTIST BIO
Robert Treat is a California artist whose paintings and photographs are generally organic oriented. His work exhibits a strong structural awareness often verging into unconscious abstraction. Primary concerns involve nature, structure, spiritualism, loss, and memory. Much of the time both painting and photography merge together. Working frequently with primitive materials such as beeswax and textured paper, Robert's paintings/photographs result in sensuous tactile surfaces and strong active shapes. For him it is a way of rediscovering a sense of self, a quality that tends to get repressed by today's modernity and media-representation.
Robert’s formal training is in Architecture and Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. After graduation, his interests expanded to photography and film animation. Along with his photographic and painting career, he has been involved in the Hollywood animation industry for over thirty years. Robert currently resides in San Diego.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Having worked in lens based photographic imagery for many years, I began to miss my background of hands-on painting and printmaking.
So with this body of work, I've combined these two realms, working primarily with painterly non-representational shapes while using cyanotype as my medium of choice. These minimal images stem from an immediacy involving the therapeutic activity of mark making. The cyanotype process permits me to draw and scrape with ink and other media on acetate to create a contact negative. This is then printed onto a variety of papers. It’s then mounted as Chine colle onto Rives BFK, at times using a blank embossing plate run through an intaglio press and other times encaustic is applied over the image to create a more physical appearance.
Robert Treat is a California artist whose paintings and photographs are generally organic oriented. His work exhibits a strong structural awareness often verging into unconscious abstraction. Primary concerns involve nature, structure, spiritualism, loss, and memory. Much of the time both painting and photography merge together. Working frequently with primitive materials such as beeswax and textured paper, Robert's paintings/photographs result in sensuous tactile surfaces and strong active shapes. For him it is a way of rediscovering a sense of self, a quality that tends to get repressed by today's modernity and media-representation.
Robert’s formal training is in Architecture and Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. After graduation, his interests expanded to photography and film animation. Along with his photographic and painting career, he has been involved in the Hollywood animation industry for over thirty years. Robert currently resides in San Diego.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Having worked in lens based photographic imagery for many years, I began to miss my background of hands-on painting and printmaking.
So with this body of work, I've combined these two realms, working primarily with painterly non-representational shapes while using cyanotype as my medium of choice. These minimal images stem from an immediacy involving the therapeutic activity of mark making. The cyanotype process permits me to draw and scrape with ink and other media on acetate to create a contact negative. This is then printed onto a variety of papers. It’s then mounted as Chine colle onto Rives BFK, at times using a blank embossing plate run through an intaglio press and other times encaustic is applied over the image to create a more physical appearance.
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