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Robert Neffson was born in New York City in 1949, though it wasn’t until he began studying art at Boston University that he began exploring the New York art scene. It was the early 1970’s and Neffson was drawn to the clean lines, intense light, and objectivity seen in the work of the Photo- Realists. This experience led to the spectacular cityscapes Robert Neffson creates today.
Neffson’s works invite contemplation and reward the searching eye. Through intense observation and attention to the formal and classical elements of pictorial composition, the artist presents views of the architecture and life of the city that makes the familiar new. Though his work is mostly devoted to his home, New York City, he has also painted Paris, Rome, Venice, San Francisco and other major cities. Unstinting craftsmanship and long hours of intense labor go into creating paintings that appear so natural and immediate as to be inevitable. Above all, Neffson searches for a unifying clarity of light that infuses these detailed works with a unique visual order.
Robert Neffson received his MFA Cum Laude from Boston University. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Rome, as well as numerous other grants in recognition of his work. He has taught at the Pratt Institute, as well as Penn State and other Universities, and currently teaches at the Art Students League in New York City.
These paintings are based on how the mind and body interacts with reality, not on the camera's vision.What separates these paintings from most photorealist work is that the aesthetic is derived on how I experience life through my inner world ; they are not merely simple transcriptions of photographs. These images are not defined by the inherent limitations of the camera's frame, which presents a partial, claustrophobic slice of a whole. Nor are they traditional panoramas: they are deconstructed "re inventions" that attempt to show a human vision of the world.
‘As a student, I would draw the human figure for many hours a day. I was also given sound training in perspective, anatomy, art history, Bauhaus design fundamentals, the craft of art, and a lot of painting from the live model. In New York City, where I was born, I copied paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and painted from life at the Art Students League. Early in my career, Lennart Anderson influenced me in his dedication to art and his belief in plein-air painting, working directly in front of the motif. In Europe and America I went to all the public collections and developed a deep love of art history. One of my most pivotal experiences was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I had access to their archives and Rembrandt print collection. They gave me a loupe and a large box of etchings, left me alone in a large room with a floor to ceiling window, and let me commune. I have studied all these images my whole life and they continue to inform, amaze, and inspire.
Philip Guston, with whom I studied in graduate school, greatly encouraged my classical, formal and figurative research. He gave me a sound understanding of abstract expressionism and its relationship to classical western imagery. My Fulbright year in Rome gave me a broader grasp of the sweep of world culture. In New Mexico and Arizona I was inspired by the vast space and intense light of the American Southwest. Manhattan, where I live with my family today, has always been a romantic place of growth and optimism to me.
When developing my own style, I tried to back it up by a rounded art historical and philosophical world view, formed through my omnivorous reading in all subjects.
I see my current project as trying to let the subject matter determine the aesthetic of each work, and I feel the individual painting should vary with the needs of the specific motif. The image is also considered vis-à-vis its link to art history. Somehow my vision, the look of each painting, seems to be consistent. Our view of the world is subjective and seen through a sensibility uniquely our own. I see painting as a phenomenological quest to try to really "know " what the world is and to create a space we can inhabit emotionally.
The work is based on long hours of sketching, observing, and photographing at the site. I take multiple photographs at various times of day and from numerous vanishing points. I study the motif in different weather and seasons. All of this is to know the object intuitively, deconstruct it and have it remade. Merely copying one photo would never allow me to accomplish this. The paintings are made entirely by hand with no mechanical transfers.
My concern is of not becoming "Academic" and of having a one-size-fits-all automatic formula that never varies. I try not to be self conscious about style--I want it to appear naturally as an out growth of my personality and as an encounter with direct experience. My images are the everyday vision of the ordinary world, which I find the ultimate mystery.
We live in a very materialistic time and the ready-made quality fits in with our throw away, buy-it-again mentality. Connoisseurship, the aesthetic feeling, have become rare and are replaced by entertainment and consumeristic catch phrases of art historical labeling. For me, it is the MAKING of the handmade object that reveals its meaning. The life in the studio, the craft of building a beautiful object, combines with the subject depicted to express a specific emotion. The invention comes in creating a unified whole that will contain all these elements that I "discover" out there. I try to blend all these disparate moments into a fluent, effortless, seemingly inevitable image.
A real invention of form today needs a slow growth and a deep focus, antithetical to our fast throw-away pop culture.
I take great satisfaction in seeing a small idea grow week by week into a strong unified whole. The paintings take months to complete and often years to gestate to completion. Yet at the end of each day, just before I go to bed, I go back to the studio for 5 minutes alone and if I can sense a little progress... I know it has been a good day.’
ROBERT NEFFSON
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