Catalogue Raisonne
Biography
Published Works
Special Exhibitions
News Releases

• Major Exhibition of Jensen’s Work at Muckenthaler Cultural Center October-December 2005
  Click here for a pdf of the complete media kit with color images of the art works
  
  
Sports Book Uses Jensen Illustrations


Freedom Foundation Award to Jensen

• Books
• Posters and Graphics
• Notepapers

• California
• Memories
• Fleurs de Liberté
• The Art of Living
• Peninsula Hotel Exhibits
• Among the Flowers
• From Inspiration to Realization
• Art for the Parks
• The Young Athlete
• The USC Trojan Marching Band
• Regency Club Exhibits
• Stephen Weiss Temple Exhibits
• The Waking Dragon Beckons
• John Wayne Airport
• In Search of the American Experience
• Israel
• The Portraits
  
  

 Biography

Robert W. Jensen

Robert W. Jensen's long interest in and affinity toward painting the beauty that surrounds him, has been the impetus for a career that has produced not only individual paintings and limited edition prints for private and public collectors around the world, but also reproductions of many of his works as illustrations in books, ranging in subject matter from his first visit to mainland China to another on youthful athletics and still another on the history of a major university's marching band.

Reilly Rhodes, who is a former museum director of not only the Bowers Museum in Orange County, but also the Albrecht Gallery, the Monterey Museum of Art and the National Art Museum of Sport, has said, "Jensen's way of looking at things tells us about the world we inhabit as a place of peace and beauty. His is a search for that lost space between what is real and what we dream and long for in our sometimes troubled lives. His work reminds us why art is important and why it should be considered as a wondrous event."

It was through Rhodes that the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, noted for having one of the strongest collections of American art in the U.S., acquired one of Jensen's paintings, titled The Diamond Belt Weigh-In, for its permanent collection, which includes works by Audubon, Inness, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Ben Shahn, and Winslow Homer.

The Diamond Belt Weigh-In painting was just one of 91 Jensen images reproduced in a book titled The Young Athlete that Jensen produced as an homage to young people and sports. Many of those images were chosen by author Mari Womack for her book, Sport as Symbol - Images of the Athlete in Art, Literature and Song. Womack, who is a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, chose Jensen's works along with those by Renoir, Goya, Curry, Archipenko and many others from the world's finest museums.

The Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, the Copley Library in La Jolla, and the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California are three other institutions with Jensen paintings in their collections. Of the latter, Jensen recently installed six watercolors of their gardens there. Jensen's works can be found in numerous private collections from coast to coast in this country, including the White House archive. A great many Jensen paintings are in Memphis, where he has actively supported the fund raising efforts of St. Jude's Children's Reseearch Hospital. He worked with the Memphis Symphony to produce a limited edition lithograph of their annual concert in the gardens of the Dixon Museum which is based on a painting by Jensen. He has an international audience as well with collectors in Japan, Kuwait, France and England.

Jensen's first gallery exhibition came about as a result of a visit to his studio by the director of Galerie Marumo in Los Angeles. With its headquarters in Paris, and specializing in 19-20th century French masters and Impressionists, the gallery had never before considered showing an American artist. When they saw the large commission that Jensen was painting for a client in Brentwood, they suggested a one-man show in the Los Angeles gallery.

That premiere exhibition, titled California, was so successful, Jensen went on to do many more for that gallery. There have been numerous other one-man shows since then, including several at the Stephen Wise Temple Schools (where his paintings hung comfortably next to Renoir, Monet and Caillebotte), the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Redlands University, the United States International University in San Diego, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the University of Southern California's Helen Lindhurst Fine Art Gallery, and a number of museums across the country as part of the Art for the Parks touring exhibition. In a program of exhibitions at La Galerie at The Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, Jensen presented paintings, drawings and prints of various parts of the world he has visited. The prestigious Regency Club atop the Rupert Murdoch building on Los Angeles' west side held a special showing of Jensen's work two years in a row.

Media response has been gratifying. Bonnie Churchill, the syndicated international radio and newspaper columnist, said 'Jensen's paintings capture a panorama of American life in action...he's a cross between Monet and Manet, but of our time, with an American heritage dating back to Daniel Boone." She was referring to the maternal side of Jensen's ancestors who were direct descendants of the famous frontiersman. Churchill was so impressed with his work that she collaborated on his book about sports, contributing stories about celebrities and their youthful experiences.

Designers West magazine called his exhibit, "...an opportunity to enjoy a light-filled moment for all time...the impressionist style lives on. Julie Jaskol, writing in the Los Angeles !ndependent, "In a Jensen painting, the landscapes...take on a lyrical lilt of turn-of-the-century Paris, or the countryside of southern France." Jennise Johnson, in the West Los Angeles College paper said, "At a time when art can take any form, no matter how ghastly or unnecessary, it's nice to know that someone is still producing work that won't leave you shocked, disgusted or indifferent." That same reviewer said of one of Jensen's paintings of the falls at Yosemite, "I could almost feel the fine mist on my face." She was referring to one of his National Park paintings, titled Bathers at the Falls. The painting was exhibited in a California Realists show at the Jolin Wayne Airport in Newport, and has since been sold to a private collector. When Horizon magazine was still being published, they compared Jensen's work to Matisse, Picasso and Whistler.

In addition to Horizon, Jensen has been the subject of numerous major feature stories in newspapers and magazines across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Santa Monica Outlook (which printed their weekend supplement cover in color reproducing one of Jensen's paintings), the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Jensen's works tend to be predominantly Impressionist, but the contemporary subjects he selects project this wonderful school of art with its origins in the nineties of the last century into the nineties of this one. The landscapes and floral works reflect the' most obviously influence, but a group of teenage boxers preparing for a competition or Chinese musicians in their ancient costumes, are definitely of the same school, albeit a somewhat more subtle exercise of the style.

He explains further, "I consider what I produce the sum total of all my experiences - education, visiting exhibits, travel, my own experiments, reading - you name it. My heritage is Scandinavian, which going back further derives from the ancient Celts. I can see strong relationships there, but on the other hand, the Impressionists and the Nabis painters really provided the soil in which my own style grew. I am captivated by the same kind of sun light here in Southern California that spurred the Impressionist painters in Southern France some decades ago; although I think my work tends to be a little more realistic than the pure Impressionists."

Known primarily for acrylic-on-canvas works, often on a very large scale (he did one landscape commission 9 X 12 feet), Jensen is equally comfortable working in other media, including watercolors, and extensive work in various print media - from hand-pulled silkscreen printing to lithography, etching, woodcuts, as well as experiments with the new technology print processes of giclée, and two new print processes he originated in his studio which he calls the laser collage and the E--D-I-T print respectively.

One of Jensen's touring exhibitions was titled Among the Flowers. Using the silkscreen process, he had completed a major serigraph of that same name, an image 40" X 54', on archival paper, printed with 27 separate screens. The color separations were all done by Jensen. The edition is limited to 385 prints, each signed and numbered. The subject is a lady in flowing pink chiffon making her way across a field of flowers at the Arboretum in Arcadia, California.

Another of Jensen's touring exhibitions was The Waking Dragon Beckons, a collection of paintings which resulted from his visit to The People's Republic of China. Nearly half of the paintings in the show were sold during a studio preview prior to the tour, with all the buyers perfectly content to wait for delivery when the tour was conclued at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. The tour also included the University of Redlands and the United States International University in San Diego.

The Miller Gallery of Fine Art in Memphis, was the setting for another collection of his work that he titled What Color is the Wind? lt consisted of works in many different media: acrylic on canvas watercolor on archival paper, lithographs, scrigraphs, etchings, and his own two original media inventions: the E-D-I-T print and the laser collage. The title of the collection is derived from international columnist and author Bonnie Churchill's narrative, in which she recalls a blind boy asking her, "What color is the wind?" (The Disney movie and song on the same subject came long after.) The paintings and her commentary may not answer the question, but they do provide food for thought on how we all perceive what we see.

His subjects range from the Huntington Botanical Gardens, the Arboretum, and other local areas to many National Parks. The Huntington commissioned Jensen to reproduce his series on their gardens as note papers for their gift/book shop. Art for the Parks, an organization headquartered in the Grand Tetons, selected one of his paintings in 1988 as one of a hundred chosen from nearly 3000 entries for a touring exhibition. The painting depicted a scene in the local Santa Monica Mountains National Park, just five minutes from downtown Beverly Hills. That painting toured in 1988-89 to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis; the Neville Public Museum of Brown County in Green Bay, Wisconsin; the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York; and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York.

His horizons have expanded in recent years as he travels around the world. One of his favorite choices for subject matter is his native Carmel. "I was lucky," says Jensen, "what better place could a future artist have as a home town than Carmel, California? That's where I grew up, and from the time I was in grammar school, I was encouraged to be an artist."

The encouragement came as a result of his natural inclination to draw and paint. When other children were playing games, he would be out climbing the rocks along the beach in search of the perfect scene. He recalls his first real direction was provided by an exceptionally gifted art teacher at Carmel High School. "He was able to convey to me the need for discipline in achieving the kinds of detailed paintings I wanted to do."

On a recent visit there, he painted a beach scene in Carmel, depicting a young boy sitting on the rocky shore watching the waves. That acrylic on canvas painting, 84" X 38", titled Boy on the Rocks, was selected from some 2200 entries by the Museum of the National Arts Foundation for a juried exhibition in New York City at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, titled In Search of the American Experience.

Since many people expressed admiration for his work, Jensen decided to make his paintings more accessible by reproducing the paintings on note papers, many of which are being sold at such book and gift shops as the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, the Norton Simon Museum and Pacific Asia Museum. Jensen has provided the notepapers as favors to many charity fund raising events, including Los Angeles Beautiful Foundation, the Footlighters, Sonance, the Los Angeles Philanthropic Foundation, the National Arts Association, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.

For the latter, he has also painted portraits of famed opera star, Marguerite Piazza, for their annual gala fund raising balls in Memphis, as well as donating another large painting (he included a limited edition lithograph and notepaper reproductions) of the Federal Express sponsored St. Jude's Golf Tournament, all used to raise money for the research hospital. His many activities for the St. Jude benefits have earned him a position on their board of directors. The large portrait now hangs in the lobby of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

His other public service activities have included producing posters for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, a benefit program book and fund-raising scarf for the Los Angeles Zoo, a SHARE benefit program booklet, and many others. The National Arts Association has commissioned him for a number of years to paint portraits for presentation to their honorees, including the late actor Vincent Price; film company executive Roy Disney; the founder of The Friends of French Art, Mrs. Elm Vanderlip of Palos Verdes; and a portrait of Etsuko Price, wife of Joe D. Price who generously donated the Japanese Pavilion to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In Memphis, he has become a popular portrait painter of many of the community's most important people, as well as their children. In 1997, Disney asked him to be a judge for their annual World Festival of the Masters art competition at Disney World in Florida.

He has, for the last three years, judged the the art work of students of the elementary and middle schools of Los Angeles, entered in the Department of Water and Power's contest to promote awareness of energy conservation and the environment.

A portrait commission to paint Trojan Marching Band Director Arthur C. Bartner, commemorating his 20th anniversary at the University of Southern California, sparked some five years later, a whole series of paintings on the band, as well as the production of a book celebrating the 25th anniversary in 1995. The original portrait was presented to Dr. Bartner in 1990, with nearly a thousand lithographs presented to the band's supporters. The book was introduced at a gala Silver Celebration at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and is now on sale through the University of Southern California book store. The series of paintings, drawings and watercolors were presented as an exhibition, The Band, at the Helen Lindhurst Fine Art Gallery at USC. His volunteer work resulted in a "Spirit of Troy" award for his generosity, service and dedication.

One of the paintings in The Band collection, titled Catalina Fourth, has been published by Jensen as a limited edition offset lithograph. The image includes both a U.S. Army and the University of Southern California marching bands, with crowds of children, some joining the parade on decorated bicycles, others just watching, a scene that took place on Catalina Island on the Fourth of July, but has certainly been repeated countless times in countless communities throughout this country over the past century with only minor modifications. Another more recent painting by Jensen, titled Trojan Victory is currently being published as a limited edition print for sale in the USC Book Store. Jensen alsodesigned a series of holiday greetings with the USC Band as the central theme. He recently completed a sculpture of the Trojan drum major introduced at the band's annual concert in El Cerritos. A study is underway to cast a life-size bronze of the sculpture for placement on the USC campus.

In 2003, Jensen painted the Trojan Marching Band on Broadway, the theme of the band's annual concert gala and fund raiser. Reproductions of it were used for the invitation, program, post cards, and a limited edition print as commemorative of the event.

The relationship with the band continues as his dual exhibition at Muckenthaler Cultural Center opens with a special event that features the USC Trojan Marching Band at the annual Orange County Football Rally and celebration of the 125th anniversary of USC.

With a firm knowledge in the disciplines and craftsmanship required for the various techniques of producing original prints, Jensen became intrigued with several modern technologies that he believed could be used to produce quality works of art. Just as printmakers at the turn of the century, such as Whistler, Hayden and Pennell, were experimenting with the processes of etching, lithography, silk screening and wood block printing, Jensen is experimenting with the modern technology available today.

In an exhibition of a suite of twelve of experimental computer images that he held in his atelier, many of his patrons snapped up the new portfolio for their own collections of his work. He calls that suite Between Thoughts and Things. It is derived from a quote from the English poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Table Talk dated August 30,1827: "A picture is an intermediate something between a thought and a thing."

Jensen has always been open to experimentation. He won a Pacifica Award for his innovative work with the rotary silk screen process while working with his original fabric designs. The Hugo Dixon International Service Award was presented to him in Memphis in 1999 at a black-tie gala of the English Speaking Union. The Memphis Symphony Association presented another award to Jensen for his donation of a painting of the symphony in the park which was used for posters as a fund raiser.

In contrast to his Impressionist works, his large abstract cascading shapes of color have gained nearly equal attention. When asked about the seeming conflict of these two styles, Jensen replies "There is none. Those abstract shapes are meticulously worked out and are the skeleton on which I build my representational works as well. Sometimes pure color and line are enough to convey what I'm trying to say, as in Integration Los Angeles. I think it very clearly states the complexity of the multicultural puzzle that is Los Angeles."

Jensen, working with his partner Keith H. Walker, in their public relations firm which specializes in arts and architecture clients such as The Hyatt Foundation, designed a touring exhibition for the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Comprised of free standing walls with photo enlargements and pedestals with architectural models, the exhibition of works by Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize has traveled for ten years. It opened in Chicago at the Harold Washington Library Center in 1992, and has since visited institutions in Texas, Washington, Nebraska, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and the District of Columbia. It was the premiere exhibit at Berlin's new Architecture Museum in 1995. After several other European venues, the exhibit was shown in South America and then returned to the U.S. for an exhibit at Brigham Young University.

For the 20th Anniversary of the Pritzker Prize, Jensen created a special exhibition for the White House where the ceremony to bestow the prize was hosted by President and Mrs. Clinton in June of the last year. That same exhibit was shown at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as well as the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

As a result of his many paintings and prints with patriotic themes, the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge selected him for their highest national special events award in 2003.

"If there are themes to my paintings," says Jensen, "it is simply the natural beauty around me, including the people who inhabit that beauty. I visited China, so I painted those scenes. I visited Europe and Mexico, and a series of paintings were the result. Because California abounds with flowers, my paintings do also. I've been accused of being a painter of 'happy' scenes. I confess to seeing the positive side of things."