I was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to create a montage of ninety of my images to be projected above the orchestra for two performances during the Spring Pops season.
The music was Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”. The conductor was Keith Lockhart who continues with the Pops and in 2010 added the title of Principal Conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra to his assignments. He recently conducted the ensemble in Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Concert.
In April I traveled to the Southern Appalachians of Tennessee and North Carolina. I spent a week working to capture the first green haze of emerging leaves as spring progressed from lower to higher elevations in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I started and ended the trip in the bucolic gateway community of Townsend, TN (see iPhone photo above).
I was fortunate to arrive at the right time. The lower slopes were just beginning to go past, but the higher ridges were still in the leafless browns and grays of winter.
I recently delivered the largest print I have made to date—84 x 108 inches, or 7 by 9 feet. The piece was commissioned by Sharp HealthCare for their new downtown San Diego medical facility.
It hangs twenty feet above the floor in the building’s three story entrance lobby. It is also viewed from overlooking spaces on the second and third floors.
Several years ago the traditional Vietnamese artisans’ group La Than Imperial Embroidery recreated my photograph “Alpenglow on Hurricane Ridge” in thread. See the sidebar link on this site for background on the project.
Last April my wife Karen and I had a chance to see the piece for the first time in person during a visit to New York. I was overwhelmed by the detail and refinement that I had not been able to fully appreciate in the photos they had sent during the year-long making of the embroidery.
In July my wife Karen and I traveled to New Mexico again to show at Art Santa Fe. This was the eighth year that we have exhibited at this “boutique” art fair. Once again, the event brought together galleries from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States.
I had a juried single-artist space at Art San Diego from September 6th through 9th, 2012. The fair, in its fourth year, was held in the Balboa Park Activities Center.
Art San Diego casts a wider subject matter net than most other art fairs. There were zones within the exhibit hall dedicated to Contemporary Art, Mid-Century and Modern Art, Contemporary Furniture Design, and Curated Solo-Artist Booths. I had one of the latter.
I exhibited at Art Santa Fe in July for the fifth consecutive year. I keep going back because my work seems to be finding a growing audience in Northern New Mexico—not only among local Santa Feans but also among art-aware people from across the country who come back year after year to spend their summers in the region.
I am working with a new gallery in Santa Fe. The Chmar Gallery opened on Lincoln Avenue, a block off the historic Plaza in October 2010 and is operated by Linda and Tod Chmar. Tod and Linda relocated their family to Santa Fe from Atlanta in 2007 to be closer to the art they had been collecting for twenty years. They are showing both my large-format landscape photography and the newer camera-based non-representational work. Read More…
New House and Studio
In June my wife Karen and I finished what turned out to be a three year project—the designing and building of a house. We did not set out to do that. We intended to find an existing home that would cut Karen’s commute in half and give me more space for my office, studio, and storage.
After a year of looking without finding anything that met our idiosyncratic needs, and egged on by our realtor whose father is a builder in Colorado (“It’s not that hard, just build one”) we did find a property in exactly the right spot and we did just that, we built one.
Received via email from a patient at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center:
Hi Robert,
First off I’d like to start by thanking you. I’m sure this will come as complete surprise to you, but you don’t know just how instrumental you have been in my recovery from cancer, AML (Leukemia) to be specific. I was diagnosed with Leukemia in June of last year and was treated at the UCSD cancer center.
Once I was able to leave my hospital room after 5 months of treatments, I came across Aspens After a Morning Rain in the Moores Cancer Center where I still get weekly treatments. I still sit in front of that picture which I believe you donated and put myself in a better place.
I am working with a new gallery in Santa Fe. 
