ROBERT M. DODGE

BIOGRAPHY

Bob was raised in the Chicago area. His father was a commercial artist and weekend painter. His art education consisted primarily of watching his father paint. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, which taught him Korean at the Presidio of Monterey, California, and ultimately sent him to Japan for two years. Upon his discharge from the service, he returned to Chicago, where he developed computer applications in a bank for 22 years, during which time he met and married Margaret Bertrand.

It was only after he and Margaret made their home together in Evanston, Illinois, that Bob began painting, and then only on evenings and weekends. In 1990, they moved to Oakland. Since then, Bob has devoted full time to his art. He began with oils, doing mostly landscapes reflecting his travels in Africa, China, Sweden, Italy, Mexico, and California. In 2003, Bob and Margaret moved to Los Osos, California.

Bob has studied monotype techniques in workshops with Glenn Brill at Kala in Berkeley, Tesia Blackburn at her Hunter's Point studio in San Francisco, and Jon Rife, also at Hunter's Point. He and Margaret traveled and painted in Michoacan, Mexico with Anthony Holdsworth. They have taken workshops in acrylic abstract painting, and collage with Bob Burridge and Lynn Kishiyama, and encaustic with Lynn and with Eileen Goldenberg.  

Bob's current work is mostly abstract.  His work has been exhibited many times in galleries up and down the Pacific coast and in Texas and Illinois, and is held in private collections from Nice, France to Tokyo, Japan.

Bob is a member of the International Encaustic Artists (IEA), the Encaustic Art Institute (EAI), the Morro Bay Art Association (MBAA), Arts Obispo, the Los Osos Collective for the Arts (LOCA), and the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA), where he participates in Central Coast Printmakers (CCP) and Oil, Pastel, and Acrylics Group (OPAG).