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 worked as a computer programmer/system designer/systems analyst 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, Tesia Blackburn at her Hunter's Point studio, and Jon Rife, also at Hunter's Point. He and Margaret traveled and painted in Michoacan, Mexico with Anthony Holdsworth.

From 1994 through 1996, Bob created a series of over 20 36" by 36" paintings of Point Lobos, near Carmel, California. These unique paintings look down from the clifftops into the wild pacific crashing against the rocks. Since then, he has concentrated more and more on an unusual technique for making acrylic monotypes, resulting in increasingly abstract creations that incorporate many different materials as collage elements.

Bob's 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 Atlanta, Georgia to Tokyo, Japan.