The Dance Painting

Artist Robin Branham creates large-scale paintings that are about surface and texture. Painting with planned abandon; she is intuitive and spontaneous but not at the cost of composition and design. She works primarily with acrylic pigments and polymer, varying the substrate to suit her needs. Her loose yet highly technical body of work appeals to collectors of representational and non representational art. Branham finds inspiration in the world around her. Theses are not literal observations but impressions that coalesce into imagery she will call upon later. Her paintings are almost always the result of intense dialogues with herself about texture surface, color balance and opposites. Throughout the creative process, she judges, measures, weighs and reacts. Large painting surfaces are the rule and include traditional canvas, paper, found objects and custom-made structures. Branham applies multiple layers of pigment and polymer to the chosen surface using brushes her hands or tape. She then takes away aggressively or gently – using a razor blade, power tools and other implements. This additive reductive process continues until for her painting makes sense. Completing a painting can take a week or it may continue as a work of progress for as long as ten years. Branham has also been deeply affected by her participation in the Celebration of Fine Art, a ten week art show that takes place annually from January through March in Scottsdale, Arizona. She has been a participant there since 1993 and calls the show her home away from home. A working venue for 100 artists in all mediums, the celebration provides Branham with opportunity t interact with collectors and share her creative process. From April through December, Branham paints in her Malibu, California studio. The small building has a cottage like façade that does nothing to suggest the controlled chaos within, where Branham is known to work on 25 or more paintings at any given time. Moving from piece to piece, the process of working on multiple paintings feeds her creative energy. During these months, she also occasional collaborates with her husband and fellow artist Randy Berkeley on art works that meld their respective mediums. Branham has a B.A. in Liberal Arts and a minor in Gallery Exhibition.