“Just Picked”

Robin Branham is an abstract-expressionist artist based in southern California. She has a B.A. in Liberal Arts and a minor in Gallery Exhibition from San Diego State University in California. Robin is the daughter of highly renowned American illustrator and commercial Hollywood artist Robert Branham. “Watching my father paint my whole life…no one could touch him. He was the painter and there was no way I was ever going to pick up a paintbrush.” But it was in her last semester of college, when she took a painting class as an elective, that a professor noticed a latent talent and urged her into a career as an artist.

Post graduation, her father worked with Robin everyday for 15 years, offering techniques, principles, and critiques to dial in her abstract work, helping shape what would become her signature style, something that’s more sculptural than just simply paint on canvas. In 1995 Robin submitted a small original painting to an art show in the Southwest. She was immediately accepted. That marked the start of her full-time career as a professional artist.

Robin creates stunningly vibrant large-scale paintings that focus on surface and texture. She works primarily with acrylic pigments and polymer, varying the substrate to suit her needs. Her inspiration stems from observing the world around her. She emphasizes that these are not “literal observations, but impressions that merge into imagery” that she will call upon later. Her paintings are almost always the result of “intense dialogues with herself about texture, surface, color balance, and opposites”. Throughout her creative process, she “judges, measures, weighs, and reacts at every stage”. Her final product arrives through the cycle of creation, destruction, and rebuilding. “I find inspiration in chaos. It is finding the process through the disorder, by playing and experimenting with the piece in front of me. I don’t create the art; I just allow it to come through what is already there.”