Robin Branham

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. “Mostly he taught me to be an inventive artist. He worked on sets in the movie industry before CGI, so he had to physically make the sets. It was always about molding, sanding, carving. He drilled into my head to experiment, play, and invent new techniques. But there were also many rules and principles for an abstract painting and I’m fortunate to have been taught those rules. You don’t just throw or smash paint on the surface. It’s all about a focal point, shape, and balance”. This thoughtful attention to technique and process is perhaps what makes Robin’s work so captivating.

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”.

In her studio in Malibu, California, she is known to work on 25 or more paintings at a time. Moving from piece to piece, the process of working on multiple paintings feeds her creative energy. Painting with “planned abandon”, she is intuitive and spontaneous, but not at the cost of composition and design. Vast surfaces are the rule and include traditional canvases, paper, found objects, and custom-made structures. Robin applies multiple layers of pigment and polymer to the chosen surface using brushes, her hands, or tape. She then takes away aggressively or gently—using razor blades and knives, power tools, and other equipment and unique items—to achieve her complex layers of texture. This additive and reductive process continues until her painting “makes sense”. A painting may continue as a work in progress for as long as ten years!

Robin’s captivating artwork has appeared in numerous art, architecture, and design publications. Her loose yet highly technical, and thoughtful, body of abstract work appeals to collectors and enthusiasts of contemporary representational and nonrepresentational art alike.