| Artist Detail |
Venus Man
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Robert Sumner
Exhibition History
Robert S. Sumner, Jr.
One Man Show
2005 Adirondack Center for the Arts, Blue Mountain Lake, NY
Group Shows
2000 “Spring New Millennium Group Invitational”, Lindenberg Gallery, Chelsea, NYC.
Juried Competitions
2008 DrawIn, 00130 Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
2003 2nd National Juried Exhibition, Gallery 402 by The Organization of Independent Artists, NYC. Juror: Susan Jarrell, get real art Gallery.
Global ART Look, Matrix Arts, Sacramento, CA. Jurors: Scott Shields, Crocker Art Museum, and Yoshio Taylor
1999 Third Annual National Juried Exhibition, Nexus Gallery, NYC. Andrea Zakin, Teacher at the School of Visual Arts, Consultant to the New York State Council on the Arts, former Education Director at the Guggenheim Museum, Juror.
'99 New Jersey Center For Visual Arts International Juried Show, Lisa Dennison, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Juror.
1999 National Juried Competition, Phoenix Gallery, NYC. Lisa Dennison, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, Juror.
Tenth National Juried Exhibition, Viridian Artists, Inc., NYC. Susan Harris, Curator of the Whitney Museum of Art, Juror.
71st Annual Juried Exhibition 1999, Art Associaton of Harrisburg, PA. Fereshteh Daftari, Museum of Modern Art, Juror (work accepted, but not exhibited due to work being committed to another show).
Images 1999 Juried Fine Arts Exhibit, State College, PA. Douglas G. Schultz, Director of Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, Juror.
"Abstraction Distraction 1999", Fredericksburg Center for the
Creative Arts, Fredericksburg, VA.
Annual National Small Works Competition, Leftbank Gallery, Salt Lake City. Peter Barney, LA Art Center, curator. Kent Rigby, Whitney King, John Alan Nyberg, jurors.
Dimensions 1999, 34th Annual National Juried Art Competition, The Associated Artists of Winston-Salem, NC. Sandra J. Reed, Juror.
1998 Wood Memorial Juried Competition, South Windsor, CT
Susan Cross, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Juror
Pleiades Gallery 16th Annual Juried Competition, Soho, NYC.
Ivan Karp, Director of OK Harris Gallery, Juror
NoBIAS National Juried Competition, North Bennington, VT
Elizabeth Levine, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Juror.
Art Institute and Gallery, Salisbury, MD. Dr. David Scott, juror, previous director of the Corcoran Gallery, and former director of The National Museum of Art.
Education
2002 Masters of Business Administration, University of California, Davis.
2000 BS, Arts Administration, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
Robert S. Sumner
Artist’s Statement
Drawing is how I discover the bones of an image. Building a drawing into a print or a painting is how I put flesh on those bones.
Henri Bergson famously compared our conscious ideas and thoughts to dead leaves that float on a pond. They float around, largely independent of each other, sometimes colliding, sometimes falling into different sequences. But their content remain relatively static. Ideas that inhabit our minds on a more personal level he compares to an object, or animal, or person in our dreams that can be several things simultaneously. This feels perfectly natural during the dream, but upon waking we find it impossible to articulate this multiplicity of being in words. It is these sorts of images that I chase when I draw, paint, and print – images with enough definition that they ‘feel right’, but enough ambiguity that the connotations are manifold.
The prints I am currently working on are part of the Dark Garden series, which is a riff on Baudelaire’s incomparable collection of French Symbolist poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal, or Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire’s poems start with a framework of recognizable reality into which he interweaves the bizarre and the fantastic. My imagery starts with the bizarre and fantastic, and I try to interweave enough echoes of reality that the image can resonate.
I fell in love with intaglio printmaking during the first introductory course I took as an undergraduate. I loved working with the metal plates, the smell of the ink, rolling the plate and paper through the press, and the fusion of paper and ink that results in an image. The tactile quality of the embossed paper that is unique to intaglio can’t be replicated in other media, and it’s inherent beauty is beguiling.
Printmaking itself is alternately frustrating and thrilling. You never know if the plate you have been working on will create the image you hope for until you pull the first proof. Sometimes you get what you are hoping for, sometimes you get more, and sometimes it is a disaster. Printmaking is a medium that has lots of room for experimentation and invites innovation. It is a medium that can exploit fortuitous accident, which has been valued in the arts for at least the last century, showing up in the works of artists as diverse as Hans Arp and the other Dadas in the early 20th century, Jon Cage, the post-war composer, and Gerhard Richter, a contemporary painter.
Printmaking also allows for the creation of multiples, which helps to counter the commoditization of unique works in the art market. This creates an increased accessibility to fine art, which is important to me.
I hope these images will resonate with you.
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