The work of artist Robert Anke is on display at several Bay Area galleries this month. At Gallery 621 in Benicia, he is exhibiting a series of paintings of crows, with co-featured artist Audrey Brown in an exhibition titled Sight and Scene. He is also a guest featured artist at Main Street Arts in Martinez; his show is titled Paint Speaks. His work includes paintings of landscapes and portraits of persons and animals, in both oil and acrylics.
About the Artist
Robert grew up in the Claremont area of southern California. “I always liked to draw. My favorite activity in first grade was to tell a story about what I did that week and draw a picture to illustrate it. My teacher called me ‘artist Anke.’ I genuinely don’t know if she was just humoring me or if I had any type of ability at that age, but I always loved to draw after that.” His early style tended toward cartoon drawings, and he attributes the Calvin and Hobbes and Looney Tunes cartoonists as important influences on the direction of his art, especially the mix of dark and light values and the inclusion of “a dash of humor.”
Anke graduated from Humboldt College in 1997 with degrees in Sociology and Fine Art. He loved mountain biking in the big trees and learned to surf. He was into social causes and listened to the militant political music of the time. “My first semester at Humboldt, I took a course called “Race and Ethnic Relations” and read mind-blowing books. That’s what got me to be a sociology major. I had no idea what I wanted to do with it, I just knew I wanted to learn it.”
After graduating, it took a few years of job hunting before he discovered teaching, which he loved. Robert taught fourth grade for ten years before landing an art position at Lafayette’s Stanley Middle School, where he has been for the past fourteen years. He has acquired a generous array of resources in his classroom, where he teaches drawing, painting, ceramic wheel throwing, hand building and collage. “Being a middle school art teacher reminds me to keep my senses of wonder and humor alive. Kids are terrific coworkers and their constant experience of ‘the new’ is a good reminder to see the world with beginner’s eyes; to see it as a beautiful, transient thing.”
Anke got back into painting around 2019, after channeling his creative energy into a variety of other things – drawing comic strips, designing video maps, and building trails for mountain bikes in Briones Regional Park. Working from his many photos of the Briones trails, he began creating landscapes. “I tend to be a jack of all trades, and I have to really focus on one thing if I’m going to get better at it.” With a sense of artistic self-discovery, he focused on putting paint on the canvas the way he liked.
Anke paints with thick, confident strokes, not blending the paint but rather laying each brushstroke and color side by side, letting the viewer’s eye blend and complete the image. “I like my work to look like I’m not scared of you seeing the brushstrokes, and that I can use the fewest number of strokes to get the idea across.” He admires the artwork of Hester Barry, for her thoughtful placement of every brushstroke, and of Carla Bosch, for her painterly style and saturated color with acrylics. “I enjoy limiting my palette to a few colors and seeing what I can do with them.”
“I had painted landscapes for so long that I decided I was going to do people for a year. I entered the Sanchez Art Center’s 50-50 Art Show in Pacifica and created fifty portraits in fifty days.” Next, he plans to focus on architecture and houses in his work.
“I’m still searching for something that I want to paint a lot of, that vein of gold that I want to dig around in, so that people associate me with ‘that work’. And until I find that, I view it all as practice. A lot of people paint the same thing over and over, and I think I’d get bored with that.”
Asked about other interests, Robert adds that he is a terrible guitar player and a terrible singer, and he has used this “ability” in his teaching. He is a member of Valley Art Gallery in Walnut Creek and is represented by Studio 7 Arts, in Pleasanton. He lives with his wife, Stephanie, in Pleasant Hill, where after a day of teaching, he goes mountain biking and paints in the evening in his home studio. For more information, visit RobertAnke.com, Gallery621.com, and mainstreetarts.net.
More about
Jan Blythe
Jan Blythe’s studio is located at 940 Tyler Street, Suite 20, in the Benicia Arsenal. She currently resides in Lafayette. For more information and images of her artwork, visit https://janblythe.com.
