Past Exhibits
Robert B. Conklin
"Voyage of Art"
June 14th - July 28th, 2009
Bob Conklin was born June 24, 1938, in Shreveport, Louisiana. His family moved to Portland when he was a small child and it has been his primary home ever since, with some years away for school and military service. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College (BA 1962) and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (JD 1965). In recent years he has been irregularly attending Portland State University.
He had two careers: 23 years as a lawyer in private practice, followed by 18 years as the owner and CEO of Timber Press, a publishing company specializing in books on plants and gardens. He also owned and ran Amadeus Press, specializing in books on classical music and opera. He sold Amadeus Press in 2003 and Timber Press in 2006, since which time he has been retired (although he has yet to have a day with enough hours in it). He has been married to Janet since 1992 and has two daughters, Christina and Anna, from his previous marriage to Mary Ellen. He has two grandchildren. All of his progeny – including Gemma, 7, and Will, 2˝ – are gifted artists living in the San Francisco area.
Since retiring from full-time work, Bob spends most of his time painting, traveling, going to school, and working with a variety of nonprofit organizations as a board member or in other volunteer capacities. He has a special love and fascination for Italy and all things Italian, spending several weeks there almost every year and pursuing the study of Italian language, history, literature, and opera both independently and at PSU.
Bob took up painting on his 65th birthday, when he enrolled in a watercolor workshop at Sitka Center on the Oregon coast. He did this strictly on a lark, with no expectation that he would even like it, but to his surprise it “took” – rather immediately and firmly. He was and remains delighted to have found a new passion late in life, as crumbling joints curtailed his enjoyment of other cherished pastimes such as hiking and gardening, and just in time to keep him out of trouble during his retirement years.
He has stayed exclusively with the watercolor medium, which he loves particularly for its transparency, luminescence, and the way the paints work on paper. He keeps thinking he “ought to move on” to oils, but so far has felt no strong pull to do so. He paints mostly from his own travel photographs, which tend to be primarily (though not exclusively) scenes, and occasionally people, from Italy. All of his art education has been obtained through Sitka workshops in the last five summers and a couple of workshops in Italy. His principal teachers have been Judy Morris, John Maslen, Laura Ross-Paul, Carol Riley, and Bill Park, to all of whom he feels deeply indebted for many happy hours – and indeed for what he is coming to think of as a third “career,” more than simply a pleasant pastime. He paints primarily in his studio space at Troy Studios in SE Portland and at his beach house in Neskowin, and only occasionally en plein air.
This is Bob’s first gallery exhibition.
