Robert Anderson

American contemporary artist, Robert Anderson is a one-of-a-kind printmaker and painter, emphasizing a unique way of creating portraiture. His work has, in contrast to his refined photo-realist technique, a definite, causal blue-jeaned feeling of the 60’s and 70’s. Anderson also successfully combines imagery from different eras of American history into modern muses and fantasies. His work has also been called “Victoriana Revisited” which is a description of the subject matter and overall atmosphere.   Anderson uses a soft focus airbrush technique. He uses shadows to show that his foreground figures are not really part of their settings. His combination of soft-edged and hard-edged techniques provoke the viewer to wonder if all the elements are truly a part of the same scene. Anderson’s paintings are executed in a surrealist vein. Although they celebrate people and faces in a realist way, the atmosphere they evoke reaches into moods.   The moods suggest mysteries of personality, character and the mind; thus, one is confronted with a kind of uneasy psychological portrait that transcends the visual, data of the features and body. The artist achieves his pictorial ambiguity between the real and surreal by the precision with which he depicts an individual and the uncertainty suggested by bold, dark areas and the somewhat telepathic glances of his subjects.