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Bob Graham was born in Texas.  After college, Graham traveled north to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he studied with the famous Impressionist painter Henry Hensche at the Cape School.  Hensche was the student of Charles Webster Hawthorne, himself the student of William Merritt Chase.  Hensche gave Graham the city of New Orleans to teach his methodology for seeing and depicting the phenomenon of light.

Graham taught courses in painting “relative color” to students in City Park and Audubon Park in New Orleans. These lessons incorporated a live model and were conducted in the open air.  Knowledge of relative color allows the artist to capture the sunlight better in both studies and finished studio works. In this methodology, the artist learns to compare colors instead of seeing them one at a time. The object of studying oil painting outdoors is to learn how to show the light in a painting using the limit of pigments in an  opaque medium.

 

Bob has garnered peer approval by winning Best of Show in: the Salmagundi Open, and the Knickerbocker Show, and the American Artists Professional Grand National Exhibition, all in New York City.  He has many portraits hanging in New Orleans including Alton Ochsner Sr., Collins Diboll, Jo Ann Weinberger, and The Saints Hall of Fame at the Superdome.

His impressions of Mardi Gras parades were published by Pelican Publishing in 2015. These images have evolved to become unique contributions to the heritage of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

 

“I was fortunate as a young man in 1970 to find a teacher who understood and could teach his students how to perceive the relationships of color in a scene. Learning to see relationships between colors required the student to paint with a palette knife and continue to add colors to their study until it had a look of light.

 

The main obstacle to overcome in painting sunny scenes is that the contrast in the scene is much greater than the pigment’s ability to represent it. The use of brighter colors makes up, to some degree, for the lack of contrast. This is why the Impressionist palette is much brighter than other palettes. The Impressionists of the twenty-first century have rediscovered the beautiful world of the original Impressionists of the 1800’s.”

 

Artist’s Statement:

To make art—to paint and draw—is a calling. Painting is unique among the seven arts because it can be experienced in a single moment; it is non-temporal. Music, literature, dance, and the other arts unfold over time. Visual art, by contrast, affects us immediately. An image reaches the nonverbal part of the brain before words do.

Artists must continue their work because art matters. Each generation creates its own art, and the rhythm continues.

Pastel has long been a favorite medium of mine. I began working with it at fourteen and started oil painting two years later. I have continued with both ever since.

I am, by nature, a portrait painter. I learned plein air painting to develop a stronger sensitivity to color, especially the subtle variations in human complexion. 

My pastel work earned two Best of Show awards in multi-media competitions in New York City, affirming it as a respected medium. Those two paintings appear on the Allegories page. That was forty years ago.

I still welcome subjects to my studio/gallery for portrait sketches in charcoal or pastel. I also enjoy photographing people in the studio or in their homes to create finished portraits. 

Pastel has a limitation about size and must be behind glass. Oil has the ability to be impasto. The thick paint adds a tactile quality much different than pastel.

     Graham

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The Impressionists:

 Edmond Duranty, “La Nouvelle Peinture”, 1876

 “In the matter of coloring they have made a real discovery for which no precedent is to be found anywhere, neither in the Dutch masters, not in the bright tones of fresco painting, nor in the light tonalities of the eighteenth century. They have applied themselves to that free and subtle interplay of colors which results from the observation of the most delicate values in contrasting or interpenetrating tones."