Introspection

Pen, brush, ink, graphite, and acrylic felt tip, 16″ x 20″

Artist Statement: I am not an Art School graduate. I was taught artistic fundamentals by my brother, the artist and art teacher, Gary Robbins. Beyond those years of practice and fantasy beginning in childhood, I am autodidact. After serious study of international traditions in art, then cubism and DADA, I focused on German Expressionist and Surrealist traditions of fusing the dream, verisimilitude, and indeterminacy into works of fine art, drawings, pen brush and ink, collage, photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media representations. I further derived my insights from many of the artists discussed and represented in artist-and-subject-specific exhibits and catalogues of exhibitions, including Dawn Ades’ Photomontage, Hans Richter’s Dada: art and anti-art, Herta Wescher’s book Collage, Robert Motherwell’s The DADA Painters and Poets, as well as John Berger’s Portraits, and Christopher Lloyd’s Masters series on the relevance of drawing. For me, as with all artists, interiority is implicit, but artists that include history and the common people in their fantasies of representation are essential, for example, Goya, Picasso, Soutine, Kollwitz, Bearden, Patchen, George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, and Kara Walker. In part, to me, the fantasy is in the euphoria or concentrated passion of arrangement, coloration, figures, shapes, and the directing emotion. An attempt to present in the images an incident of imagination, attraction, allurement, a type of imponderable intensity.

Doren Robbins is a poet, mixed media artist, and educator from Santa Cruz, California. Robbins’ art and written works have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, 5AM, The Iowa Review, Kayak, Lana Turner, Miramar, New Letters, Nimrod, Otoliths, The Pedestal, Salt and Sulfur. His books have been awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. In 2021 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems 1975-2015. He was Professor Emeritus at Foothill College until 2022.

A Song for Doren