Stan Robbins

  Artist's Biography

  Stan Robbins grew up in a culture devoted to illusion, image and impression. He was immersed in a society that earned its living making things look like something else or someplace else, not to deceive, but to entertain. For most of four decades his father worked in the Southern California movie industry as a plumber who specialized in water effects and underwater filming. Stan's dad showed him around the studios at night, showing him the sound stages and sets and the back lots where the movie-making magic occurred.

  Stan saw impressionism at its extreme; he saw huge painted backdrops on sound stages that looked like broad western landscapes or tall Rocky Mountains or dense jungles. These backdrops were painted with big six-inch house painting brushes, done in splashes of bold colors; from a distance they looked real, they gave the effect of the place. However, up close, Stan saw wild abstract brush work. He was dazzled with both elements. Today, Stan loves both the impression that a painting makes and the abstract shapes of color and paint that link together to form that impression.

  In the early twentieth century, California was a paradise for the first generation of impressionist painters. They painted the canyons of Southern California, the ocean and coast from Laguna to Monterey, and the mountains of the Sierra. Later, during the 1930s, as the Depression wiped out their vocation, they painted murals in public buildings for the WPA and movie sets for the film studios. Stan saw these beautifully painted murals in the schools and post offices and on the sound stages where his dad would take him in the evenings after the filming crews were gone. He reacted; he wished that he had painted them. He would liked to have been the person who created these dazzling paintings. That feeling has become an artistic drive - wanting to create great impressionist paintings.

  Stan first learned painting from a Universal Studios set painter, a friend of his father who would give Stan encouragement , advice and some art supplies. He also received good instruction from his fifth-grade teacher who paid special attention to him because of his talent and intense dedication to art. He has continued to paint and has sought advice from every good source he could.

  Stan also experienced another part of Southern California culture: cars. While still in high school he got his first art job, illustrating race cars for a drag racing magazine published in Los Angeles. In college he had an odd mix of interests: he studied psychology, statistics and art. He has always drawn and painted. Since retiring from a high-tech career in Northern California's Silicon Valley he has painted, and shown his paintings, a great deal more. He now lives on the Monterey Peninsula.