We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Robin Schaefer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Robin, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.
I am very grateful to come from an artistic family where various forms of creative expression were practiced and celebrated on a daily basis. My mother is a classically trained musician, she composed her own folk songs as a teenager and my brother and I grew up hearing her play them on her guitar. As a child I also loved sitting next to her on the piano bench as she played Chopin and Bach. She is also an amazing seamstress and gardener. Growing up she made several quilts by hand, helped us to sew our own halloween costumes and became the costumer for our middle school stage productions. My father had a degree in creative writing, and passed on an appreciation for the beat poets and writers of the 50s and 60s. He also listened to a great deal of early electronic and experimental music. In our house it was typical to hear Tangerine Dream’s, Rubycon or Pat Metheny and Lyle May’s As Fall Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. The gravelly voice of Tom Waits was also commonplace, along with bands like the Who and German experimental rock band Can, among many others. My brother was an amazing draftsman from an early age and also extremely mathematical. He would draw intricate mazes for my parents to solve and build elaborate geometric sculptures out of origami paper and later cardboard. These passions eventually lead him to becoming a master woodworker and puzzle designer which he’s built a lifetime career around. As for me I was taking all this in, coloring, painting, sewing, reading furiously and dreaming. Needless to say our house was a ramshackle mess of art supplies, things in various states of construction, drawings on the walls, giant holes in the backyard and a hot glue gun that was always in use. Our basement had a little rickety workbench in it, next to an old belching furnace. My brother and I spent a great deal of time in this cramped, Lynchian-like room, just…creating. We made pirate ships with glue guns and nails, hammered boards and scraps of things together. My parents gave us the gift of autonomy in this space and with our creations.They understood the need for kids to have messy attempts and failures and they freely allowed space for it in our home. Now that I am a parent myself I appreciate my parents ability to honor this and can see how difficult it can be to not interfere with your child’s own discovery and need to see an idea through. It’s hard to forgo a clean and serene living space for a messy, stained and pockmarked one but it’s so important to give kids space to create. In honor of my own creative upbringing it’s about time for me to build that workbench in the garage and plug in the hot glue gun for my own children.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I grew up in Denver, Colorado and fell in love with drawing and painting at a young age. I completed a BA in Fine Art with an emphasis on painting from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon and as a young artist I was very transient, spending as much time as possible traveling and completing apprenticeships with artists in London and New York City. Eventually, I settled back in Denver, maintaining a studio while showing with a local Gallery for several years. In 2012 I relocated to Washington, DC and received an MFA from George Washington University. In DC I held positions with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History as a collection photographer and was a resident artist with Red Dirt Studios, MD. In 2019, I relocated back to Denver with my husband and three children.
I am in love with painting and my paintings are often large-scale monuments to very small things. I like to borrow from traditional oil painting techniques in order to create hyper-realistic depictions of organic subjects, ephemeral household objects, and irregular portraiture. My compositions play with reflection, placing subjects on mirrors or other reflective surfaces to create a liminal space, one that becomes a dance with reality. On a technical level, I build thin layers of paint, allowing light to reflect through them, harkening back to the luminescence of the old masters. I push the painted surface to a point where it appears incandescent and ghostly.
My recent work has been a celebration and study of the transformations, mutations and beauty I find in plants and insects. One of my favorite paintings is titled “Internal Proliferation”, which is the scientific name for a baby pepper that grows inside of a bell pepper. I have always marveled at finding these abnormal, alien-like shapes and depict the double life living within a seemingly normal vegetable.
“Anthem” is one of my most recent works. Using a Robin’s egg, I utilize the egg’s natural elements to surprise my viewer with a stuffed piece of hot pink tissue paper protruding from the egg. This painting is very much about facing loss and the transformation that occurs when we face grief. My ultimate goal in both of these paintings is to express humanity’s vulnerability.
Though I have worked in film, encaustic, and other mixed media, I return to painting. Through painting fine details and focusing on the micro instead of the macro, I explore my humanity and attempt to show the viewer something they might not see or notice otherwise. In my recent work, as I explore themes of motherhood, I further realize that nothing could be more human than illuminating the fragile, temporary, and isolated.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In 2017 I had a daughter and in 2019 I had twins. Needless to say, having one child causes you to pivot creatively and having twins makes you really spin. I have had to put much of my creative life on hold while my kids were really young and at home. I deeply understand the struggle that creative parents face in maintaining a work/life balance and saving space to keep the creative parts of themselves alive. It’s very important for both my husband and I to keep our creative practices going and yet I’ve had to compromise more than ever on creative space and time. I’ve struggled to find the energy and momentum needed to keep my creative practice alive but I also know that as my kids get older this will become easier. In order to jump start my practice again I have been planning a new series of portraits that delve into this issue that creative caregivers face and the isolation that can often come with it.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Artists need affordable space to work and they need opportunities to be around other artists. As the housing prices continue to increase in our country, I feel artists are struggling to maintain studio space and are getting pushed out of communities. This is an interesting moment in time, in that technology has become such a powerful and influential force in our lives but I still see the value in face to face collaboration and having discussions with other artists. Just a place to share ideas and have meaningful conversations. I don’t think you can lead a creative life and be really isolated in your practice. Yet it can be increasingly rare to find a place to work and be around other like minded artists. I am very grateful for the art spaces I found throughout my career, particularly as a young artist just starting out and I feel like those kinds of spaces are really disappearing. They are literally turning into distilleries and condos. Theres not an easy solution but I feel society can really support artists by giving them affordable space to create their work and show their work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://robinschaefer.com/
- Instagram: birdloop
- Facebook: Robin Louise Schaefer
- Linkedin: Robin Schaefer