A retrospective of paintings by Robert Michener. About his work, he wrote on his website: "My paintings are my dream of a possible future. Although they frequently derive from specific locations or combinations of several sites, the structures of the paintings are imaginative. Because my motifs are small family farms--current or remembered--they may evoke feelings of nostalgia. If my paintings hearken back, it is only to discover values we must embrace if there is to be a future. We must learn to live gently with the land." From his website, we also learn that..."Michener taught art at the University of Minnesota, Western Washington University and the University of Cincinnati before immigrating to Canada in 1973 to accept a position at the Vancouver School of Art (subsequently The Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) where he retired from teaching in 1999." Robert passed away in 2021 after enjoying a long career in fine art. Many of his finer paintings can still be seen featured on his website, alongside some auction results from Heffel over the years. Unfortunately, the colour balancing and tonality of his paintings are often unfairly misrepresented, as his works are quite large and can be tricky to photograph, receiving uneven lighting, picking up too much ambient reflection, and muting his colour palette. This is exacerbated with low resolution, low quality images online. Even the paintings featured on his own website suffer from these copywork challenges. When viewing these paintings at a smaller scale, is necessary to view them with deeper tonality to get a closer impression of the original. I've taken a few of my favourites, and tried to adjust them to a more suitable screen luminosity, for your viewing pleasure. When Robert had a show at the Surrey Art Gallery in 1998, Paula Gustafson wrote these most appropriate words about his work: "His dwarfed distances, relaxed realism, and his superb use of line, color, and composition work in harmony to create the 'spiritual places' of elemental majesty."
