Robert Swain is an American artist who represents the field of the Color Sensation. In his abstract paintings, he combines the hundreds of colours to explore their influence on our physiological state and emotions. He is also an author of several essays and lectures on this topic.
Background
Robert Swain was born on December 7, 1940, in Austin, Texas, United States. He is a son of Robert Oliver Swain, a military man, and Elisabeth Anne Brower. Robert has a younger brother whose name is Peter John.
As a child, he often moved with his family to different military bases. At the age of sixteen, he explored the art of Raphael, Rembrandt, and Vermeer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. That had a strong impact on his decision to become an artist.
Education
Robert Swain finished his general education at the Hawthorne School, Washington D.C. where he had studied for two years from 1957.
For a couple of years, he entered the American University of Washington D.C. After his sophomore year, young Swain spent three months of his summer vacations in Western Europe. Then, in 1961, he travelled to Spain where he had studied at the University of Madrid for three years.
Then, he came back to Washington D.C. and graduated from the American University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1964.
The start of Robert Swain’s professional career can be counted from 1956 when he took part in the construction of the Pan-American Highway in Guatemala, a year later in Nicaragua and then in New Mexico.
To earn his living during his senior year at the university, Robert worked as a guard and an exhibition assistant at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
After graduation, Swain relocated to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he found a job of an assistant at the studio of Karl Knaths. This period, the young artist created his first series of paintings. Due to the help of Olga Thenen, they were presented at the debut solo exhibition of Swain organized in 1965 at the Thenen Gallery in New York City. The same year, the artist relocated to the city and established his first studio on Five Lispenard Street.
Since 1966, the colour became the central subject of Robert Swain’s canvases. During the experiments with the topic, the artist adopted his famous grid system. These artworks were demonstrated at his first group exhibitions which took place at the Park Place Gallery in New York City and at the Bennington College in Vermont, both in 1967. Due to the latter show, Swain began his collaboration with the Fischbach Gallery which became his art dealer.
Since then, Robert Swain has participated in a huge number of group exhibitions, including the international shows, at such art galleries and museums as the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Everson Art Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the art spaces of Central and South America, France, Switzerland and elsewhere.
In 1968, the artist joined the teacher’s staff of the Hunter College of the City University of New York as an adjunct professor. He began to work with a sculptor Tony Smith who became his friend.
The same year, Swain tried his hand as a commercial artist for the first time – he produced a huge architectural installation at American Republic Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Other public commissions the artist has worked on during his career include the projects for the Travenol Laboratories of Chicago, the Tupperware World Headquarters in Orlando and the Johnson & Johnson Headquarters in New Brunswick.
The year of 1982 was marked by the artist’s promotion to the Full Professor at the Hunter College.
In 2006, the artist began his brushstroke series.
One of the recent shows where Robert Swain participated along with Gabriele Evertz and Sanford Wurmfeld took place in 2018 at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit.
Nowadays, Robert Swain lives and works in New York City.
Robert Swain is an accomplished artist whose colourful abstract paintings are widely recognized.
During his career, he has participated in about twenty solo shows and over sixty group exhibitions.
Swain’s achievements in teaching were marked by the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association. Despite, he was a recipient of many prestigious fellowships, including the grants from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (ten times), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (twice).
Robert Swain’s artworks are nowadays can be found in about 284 private and public collections, including such well-known art galleries and museums, as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Walker Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Center, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Everson Art Museum, the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Quotations:
"Color is a form of energy derived from the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulates our perceptual processes and is instrumental in conveying emotions."
Connections
Robert Swain met his future wife, Annette Carol Leibel, at the high school. They married on October 4, 1969.
