ROBERT STANDISH
Artwork

Oil over acrylic on canvas 48 x 60 in.

Acrylic on wood 47 x 47 in.

Acrylic on panel 47 1/2 x 47 1/2 in.

Oil over acrylic on canvas 48 x 60 in.
Biography

For eighteen years, Los Angeles painter Robert Standish had been abstracting reality through photorealistic paintings of seemingly everyday snapshots of real life. Four years ago, Standish shifted away from constructing life-like replicas of the world to delving deeper into the unconscious unknown and new psychological depths.
For Standish, the move into abstraction developed as a confluence of Abstract Expressionism, and interest in cosmology and topography, and psychological theory. He uses a wet-on-wet technique, applying thick curls and rippling lines of enamel and oil paint on top of one another with a palette knife, smearing and blending contrasting colors in an immediate and unbounded gesture. Citing Dr. Carl Jung as an inspiration, Standish’s paintings represent the powerful symbolization of cosmic infinity and a “world within a world.”
With an interest in metaphysics and theology, Standish uses basic elements like line, color, and texture, to represent the dynamism, constancy, and transcendent flow of the universe. There are no finite borders or endings in his works as every stroke bleeds into one another in an eternal unbroken chain that seems to extend far beyond any conceivable edge of the canvas. Standish taps into a universal and organic language as his traces begin to take on the shape of fractal patterns, earth frequencies, and biorhythmic waves. As he once manipulated the real into the un-real, Standish now transforms the natural into the supernatural.