Mother of a Disabled Vet

Ink, cloth, cut-out, watercolor, and photograph. 22” x 28”

Artist statement: My works come out of the DADA, German Expressionist, and Surrealist traditions of fusing the dream, verisimilitude, and indeterminacy into works of fine art, collage, photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media representations, many of which are discussed and represented in artist-and-subject-specific exhibits and catalogues of exhibitions, Dawn Ades’ Photomontage, Hans Richter’s Dada: art and anti-art, Herta Wescher’s book Collage, Robert Motherwell’s The DADA Painters and Poets. Interiority is implicit, but artists that include history and the common people in their fantasies of representation are essential, referring to Goya, 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 and the directing emotion. An attempt to present in the images, something connected to Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s idea of Duende, an incident of imagination, 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