brooklyn express

“I started painting when I lived in Austin, but everyone I had ever admired as an artist had spent a lot of time in New York, and I wanted to experience this city for myself,” says Robert Szot. “I came in the summer of 2001, and I figured if I wasn’t ready to go home after 9-11, I was here for the long run.” Following in the footsteps of de Kooning, Rothko, Twombly, and others who have expressed feelings of chaos, comfort, confusion, love, and disillusionment on canvas, Szot set up a New York studio—first in Downtown Manhattan, later in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and recently in the Gowanus area,where he found a “much bigger space—with heat. It’s a turning point in an artist’s career when he gets his first studio with heat,” Szot says, laughing. “I feel very fortunate.”

Working only in oil, Szot’s abstract compositions are, he says, attempts to work out problems with color and pattern. “People put themselves into the paintings and respond to them in a personal way,” he observes, “but none of my compositions are based in anything tangible. They are essentially ‘arguments’ I am having with myself, problems that I am trying to work out.”

Working independently in his studio, Szot will spend weeks, sometimes months, adding to, subtracting from, and, “in one out of four attempts” discarding or painting over unsatisfactory compositions. “My strength as a painter is in solving problems. And I can only work on one at a time.”

Resources:

Artist Robert Szot, rszot@rszot.com; rszot.com; artandinteriors.net. WORKS, by Robert Szot can be purchased at blurb.com/user/rszot.