Robert Reeves
I've been an artist since my earliest days in rural Arkansas, creating and leaving a legacy of my work in several locations. Through formal training and self-initiated searching, I've experimented with a variety of media including wood, metal, stone, pastels, acrylic and oil painting. My work is strongly influenced by my education at Washington University in St. Louis where I received a Master of Architecture degree in 1967.
For the 20 years after graduation, I mainly pursued a career as a city planner in St. Louis and San Francisco. In both cities, I played a key role in formulating strategies for economic, social and physical development policies. At the same time, however, I was also pulled by the desire to create. I expressed those desires through periodic sculpting or painting binges or building things. In St. Louis, my desire to build and create was fulfilled by renovating real estate. In San Francisco, it was designing and building my own hilltop home.
By my forties, I had achieved my dreams of a house on a hill and a successful career as a planner. However, the experience of designing and building my own home proved to be transitional for me. The visions of my future changed as I started designing and making furniture for the house. I began experimenting with layering techniques drawn from my planning experience working with topographic maps and models. And I found to my amazement that the work I was creating had some substance and originality that was eliciting a very positive response.
In 1990, I moved to the Palm Springs area seeking a scaled-down lifestyle, warmer climate and larger workspace to create. I found a classic 1961 midcentury modern house in the Cathedral City Cove neighborhood that I bought and converted the garage into a sculpture studio. I refined my techniques of laminating forms, experimented with different material and finishes and explored the visual and structural possibilities of lamination through a series of abstract forms. I started a series of life-size human sculptures, including my signature work "Rob" which helped me
In recent years, I've begun producing limited edition series of selected designs employing templates that enable me to more easily produce replications of the original design. Each item produced is handmade, numbered, dated and signed. I also continue to produce unique, one-of-a-kind sculptures, often at a much larger scale, and I occasionally create painted works to see how color affects the form.