What do you do, when your dream comes true, and sends demons?

Rob has always functioned at the intersection of art and technology, and has been more interested in the challenges than the resolution. If you know what you’re doing, why bother? That, and “How hard can it be?” It’s lead to an odd career, with bifurcations and wanderings.

For example, when he realized his albumen work would be better supported by machine coated paper, he spent over a year designing and building a coating machine, and bought 5,000 pounds of paper, the minimum for a making run to his specifications. Whatever it took. His epiphany was an invitation to the Camden Center for Creative Imaging: a playground for digital art. Digital offered creative freedom and control, but at a very high price. In 1991, the necessary gear was the price of a house or two, and beyond his grasp. Aside from the financial realities, there was also the overarching problem of turning out the work. Never prolific, production pressures had sucked all the joy out of success. Bringing a still damp piece to the gallery hours before an opening was a clue that he was sucking on a dry straw.  

Rather than surrender to the realities and limitations of a working artist, he shut down his public face, and divorced his art from commerce.

He founded several technology based companies that manufactured and resold the tools he needed for his work, and which then supplied the technology to larger, more profitable markets than art; ad agencies, publishers, and large retailers. In short, Fortune 500 companies needed the same technology as his art, so he combined the needs for mutual benefit.

After 40 shows in 10 years, what got left behind was his career, but that was a conscious choice. The good news is that the decision to recede from the commercial fray freed him to be relentlessly experimental, within some self induced constraints; physically beautiful prints, large, with often challenging subject matter absent thematic consistency. At play again.

His body of work includes still life, memento mori, nudes, industrial landscape, landscape, cityscape and nightscape. He’s focused his recent work more narrowly, and a small selection is on display on this site. Rob’s always been known for stunningly beautiful printing. The subjects of the work on display are rather more accessible than some other, more challenging efforts he’s known for. That body of work is not here, for the moment. It’s not safe for children or nursing mothers. Well, not strictly true. His two kids are just fine, thank you.

Photography has been his principal medium since 4th grade, but in 2015 he began sculpting in earnest, and in 2016 started using 3D printing, both as a maquette for lost wax bronzes, and for resin based direct printing of finished work. 

He has taught courses in alternative process printing, and the use of super-computers in original art production at The Maine Photographic Workshop, The Santa Fe Workshop, The Woodstock Workshop, The Center for Creative Imaging, and many others.

His companies, all of which he’s now exited, include The Palladio Company, which produced machine coated platinum/palladium paper, NAPC, which provided high end digital solutions to the advertising, retail and publishing industries, and most recently, ARTBnk, a financial technology platform which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and image recognition to deliver real time valuations of art. 

If not now, when?

His work is in many public and private collections. A fire in 2012 destroyed many of the records of where work wound up. As well as many prints and the original negatives.

Thanks for looking.

@rjsteinberg