1990s Sally Robertson Realist Watercolor Painting of a New Guinea Creeper, Framed

Description

Artist: Sally Robertson - American
Title: New Guinea Creeper
Year: 1996
Medium: Watercolor
Sight size: 24.5 x 16 inches
Sheet … more Artist: Sally Robertson - American
Title: New Guinea Creeper
Year: 1996
Medium: Watercolor
Sight size: 24.5 x 16 inches
Sheet size: 29 x 22.25 inches
Framed size: 33x 27 inches
Signature: Signed, titled, dated lower right..
Condition: Very good
Frame: Framed and matted. simple metal frame

This very realistic watercolor depicts a flowering plant, a New Guinea Creeper The colors are rich and saturated. The composition makes wonderful use of shadow and light to give definition and depth. The painting is on heavy Arches paper. It is mounted and floating on a simple acid-free mat and enclosed by a metal frame. The painting mat and frame are in very good condition.

Born in San Francisco and raised in Marin County, Sally Robertson was always the class artist. Attending UC Santa Barbara during the Pop Art era, she found the aesthetics of soup cans and Brillo boxes could not entice her into being a full-time artist. She switched to the History of Art, later earning a Master’s Degree at UC Berkeley. Even then, late 19th-century art nouveau resonated with her, a style sensuous and decorative with an emphasis on floral motifs. With this background, Sally joined a gallery on Union Street in San Francisco, which evolved into Thackrey & Robertson, significant dealers in works of art on paper from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Traveling widely for her gallery, she saw the originals of her most revered watercolor painters, including Charles Demuth, Charles Renee Mackintosh, and Joseph Raffael. After moving to Bolinas in 1978, while still working at the gallery, she began to cultivate her property and joined Strybing Arboretum (now the San Francisco Botanical Garden). Somewhat intimidated by her first-hand knowledge of great watercolors, this enticed her to enroll in a six-week course, “Watercolor in the Spring Garden,” at the Arboretum in 1986. She learned enough techniques to become obsessed with watercolor and never looked back. She went on to have three solo shows (1996, 2003, 2007) at the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture at the Arboretum.

Her garden in Bolinas started as a 100 by 100-foot parcel. Practically wild, she has stewarded this piece of earth into a magnificent garden by adding neighboring lots to become an almost acre plot. Inspired in part by gardens of Provence, it features shaped shrubs that punctuate garden spaces defined by meandering pathways. Plants are chosen both as part of the garden’s palette and as potential subjects for her watercolor work. Her spacious downstairs studio opens into this magical Eden replete with a large koi pond.

During her career as an art dealer, both her painting and gardening evolved together in a symbiotic way. After the gallery closed in 1995, Sally became a full-time artist, gardener, and teacher. (Full disclosure: I was a student on two of her Art Trek trips to France and Tahiti.) In 1994 her friend Mary Nisbet, of California Orchids, Bolinas, introduced her to the world of orchids. The “strange beauty of orchids” resonated as subjects and offered a new visual vocabulary. For 20 years, from 1996 to 2015, Sally designed the posters for the Pacific Orchid Exposition in San Francisco and exhibited her work there. The graphic technique of flowers bursting out of their backgrounds, first used for a poster in 1997, was to become a signature part of her painting. Her orchid paintings were featured in “The Artistry of Orchids” exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 2000.

Sally sees her garden as a palette, and her telling credo of “a painting in every petal” reminds us of her rich symbiosis with her garden. This exhibition follows her work from early studies to the fully realized watercolors of later years.

—Barbara Janeff, Guest Curator, Bolinas Museum less