Blair Robbins

BLAIR ROBBINS is a contemporary diverse media artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Creating art is and has been a constant in her life. She was raised in a suburb of New York City, where her early impressions were colored both by the natural beauty surrounding her in a coastal Connecticut town and the intense collage of a big city full of art. Moving west, she traveled the western parklands extensively, observing the landscapes, flora, and fauna as she created films on nature and landscape stories earning twenty-four awards in national and international film festivals. Independent filmmaking was a significant influence on her art. To her, cinematography was poetry in motion. Looking through the camera lens, her senses were heightened by the vivid colors and patterns of nature, its movements and rhythms, the play of light, the passage of time, the textures, smells, sounds, the characters, and stories that emerged. Her extensive travels in the American West inspired her to return to her roots in studio art.
Today, her primary focus is contemporary watercolor painting. Her subjects are primarily landscapes, flora and fauna of the Southwest. She holds a passion for horses, especially wild horses free-running in the vast landscapes, which allude to the Sky Dogs of her Osage ancestry. Her creative process is freeform and improvisational. Expressive line work often accents her watercolor paintings, as well as no brush and dry brush technique. Her new series of paintings are of mixed media: watercolor + wire sculpture. Creating in wire is to hold a line and envelope space, creating a form that is gestural in nature. Her artistic sensibility and vision reflect the diversity of media that her hands have touched, culminating in works that carry a freshness in their vitality and character. What ties her works together is her fascination with time and change. Change happens on a variety of scales — from sudden changes in expression on one’s face, to the pathway of light over the course of a day, to the sculpting of the earth’s surface over deep time. The essence of her work involves the element of change for change implies motion, and motion sparks a feeling of life.