OIL PAINTER/AMERICAN IMPRESSIONIST
Painting with oils has defined who I am. It has changed my life completely. I am not blind to the sunlight, shadows, color and beauty all around us. Picking up a brush again, after nearly thirty years away, has proven to be a blessing and a gift. I have been fortunate to be entrusted with the ability to paint in a way that others enjoy and find pleasure in. It is wonderful to see and know that a painting has touched someone through color and texture to make that piece mean something to them personally.
The joy that I have had in teaching for over 3 years now has been something that I will never forget. It has been a pleasure to see students push themselves, experiment and take risks to make their own work come alive and become a piece of who they are. It seems that we teach each other about color, technique and execution. We all learn from the Masters and one and other. That is what it's all about.
Working on a painting can be frustrating, depressing, an anxious obsession and all consuming. My greatest joy and my deepest troubles come from painting. I go through a lot of thought, color changes, re-doing the composition and thinking this one was a bad idea. I have learned that a good piece of art doesn't just happen, it evolves. A good piece of art will hold my interest for a long time. There is something about earning that finished painting. It is true that a piece of an artists soul goes into every painting they do. It is personal. It is a visual statement of who we are. I don't show anything until it works for me. I view my work sometimes for months, hanging in my home, before it hits a gallery.
Success is not in sales nor is it in recognition. Personal satisfaction comes in knowing that what I have finished was through the assistance and divine guidance of my maker. It is His work. I merely hold the brush. That, is the truth for me. There is no other way for me to explain how or why this has all come to be. I never get the experience of seeing my work for the first time. No artist does. That would be a wonderful experience.
Saul Ostrow, dean of visual arts and technologies and chair of painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art, stated in The Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, November 28, 2004, “Perhaps what is most effective is Crombie's treatment of the paintings’ surface. His brushwork and drawing bring the paintings to life. His patterns of agitated brush marks are descriptive and in the same instance they give the paintings an abstract quality. He captures psychologically his subject, be it nature or the back of a house.”
Robert Hall Crombie
rcrombie@neo.rr.com
330-696-0815