I live in Cambridge, MA with my partner, son, and our two cats, Daylight and Freedom (named after famous trains). I grew up in West Virginia, where my parents settled as part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. My teachers were hippies and spiritual seekers; I went to a commune elementary school called Claymont started by followers of G.I. Gurdjieff. I read and drew a lot. I loved fairy tales, myths, and folklore, and used to pore over pictures by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and H.J. Ford (the illustrator of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books). I also loved nature, and had a lot of freedom to roam around unsupervised outdoors.

At Bard College and the University of Chicago I studied myths, rituals, and social theory. During grad school, I let art-making go. When I came back to it, I spent time relearning fundamentals of perspective, composition, pen and ink and watercolor techniques, and bringing together images and narratives in comics and illustrations.

More recently—partly in reaction to the exhausting flawless image productions of AI—I’ve gotten interested in questions of animacy. I’m drawn to art that shows the marks of human hands and is responsive to the influences and accidents of the unrepeatable world. With this focus I’ve been making different kinds of objects: birdhead dolls, twig lanterns, and cyanotype prints.

The dolls are made from wool, wire, papier mache, thread, glue, paint, and upcycled fabric. Their characters emerge in the process of making them, from the accretion of my choices and limitations and the contributions of salvaged materials. The lanterns come from twigs and fallen branches that I find walking down by the river, together with paper, glue, wire, upcycled tea bags, dried rose petals. Like the dolls, the lanterns have qualities of liveliness and individuality that derive from the nature of their materials (the twists and angles of twigs that register their unique histories of growth) in interaction with my particular mind and fingers.

Cyanotypes are made by coating a surface (I use watercolor paper) with a mixture of iron salts, arranging objects on the surface, exposing it to sunlight, then rinsing it in water. The unpredictability of the resulting images—dependent on breezes and passing clouds, the moisture in the air, the season of the year—makes this an alchemical, timebound process of exploratory play. By combining vines, weeds, and flowers with the dolls, lanterns, and other familiar objects transfigured into dream characters that flicker in and out of animacy, I look for pictures that serve as openings to the living world.

For work inquiries, or just to say hello, I can be reached at the email address below.

robinsongabriel64@gmail.com