Robert Bean: Reading a Painting Through Visual Vocabulary

About this Episode

Robert Bean found himself stuck between needing a job that didn’t involve his craft, wanting to spend time with friends, and still being able to practice his art. “I have to practice, I have to draw, I have to create,” Bean said. “At the same time, I don’t want my life to be nothing but, I go to work, and then I come home and go to work. … I got creative and I said, ‘Well, what would happen if my friends were going out to dinner, or we’re going out to grab a beer or something--what happens I just take a sketch book with me?’ And so I started drawing on site. I started going out with friends and I would take a sketchbook and I would sketch while we were out. I do that all the time now.”

Bean turned the idea into a class at the Arkansas Arts Center, Urban Sketchbook, where he also serves as the Painting & Drawing Department Chair of the Museum School. “I encourage my students, if you’re sitting around in the doctor’s office, take a sketchbook,” Bean advised. “Draw in the waiting room. If you’re sitting at the DMV, draw while you’re sitting there. Waiting for your car to get fixed, sketch. You can find the time to sketch. You can find the time to keep those drawing skills alive because we have a lot more dead time in our days than we realize. It’s the idea of developing those kinds of disciplines that eventually roll around into making money. Because as soon as you start to create enough, as soon as you start to draw enough, you build body of work. Once you build that body of work, then you can show it. It took me ten years of figuring things out. I do look back at that period in my twenties and go, what if I had that mentor when I was 21 years old that would come in and say, ‘You’ve got to do this and this and this’? Maybe I would have started to make money earlier, but I was in my late twenties before I started making money somewhat consistently with my work."

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Get more of Robert's work:
Gallery 26 - http://www.gallery26.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rbfineart/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RBFineArt
Website - http://www.rbfineart.com/

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and crafts people to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Joshua Kurtz, Morgan Allain (The Inkling Girl), Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance & Nomad Neighbors), and Local. Magazine.

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