This week’s featured artist is Robin Cheers, an oil painter with a true knack for capturing life’s fleeting moments through painterly brush strokes and vibrant color.
Like many figurative painters who work on a small scale, Robin’s paintings tend to focus on posture and overall sense of movement to define a person within a scene.
For instance, in Sidewalk Cafe, simple body language tells the entire story.
Neither subject’s facial features are clearly painted, but it doesn’t matter—that part is left up to our imagination. Just the tilt of the woman’s head and the way she leans to make eye contact is enough for us to fill in the details.
In this next painting there’s even less structure, and yet it works just as well or better.
Can you hear the hum of a restaurant? That constant low murmuring between tables mixed with the intermittent clink of silverware or glass?
I love the absolute freedom Robin has with her brushstrokes here, and the audacity of that pure orange paint on the waiter’s sleeve! Just imagine this painting without that freedom of movement, with strict outlines and carefully blended colors—without a doubt it would lose ALL its life and vitality.
(And if you liked that painting, there are several other restaurant-themed paintings on Robin’s daily painting blog which I’d highly recommend checking out too.)
There are also a few more of these unique figure studies, painted from above.
This particular series reminds me a bit of Degas, really. . . how he’d find the strangest vantage points to paint his ballerinas and, despite the tricky foreshortening, come up with movement and humanity in spades.
To see more of Robin’s artwork, including new paintings nearly every day, please visit her daily painting blog at RobinCheers.blogspot.com.