Robert Mertens

I like to make pictures that explore the inner life. The physical works are expressions of a life within my life. They are also a way I can connect directly with people through their eyes.

The core of my work is a search for beauty. When I find it, I feel gratitude. This experience of gratitude is, for me, the heart of my worship.

I use a camera and Photoshop, mostly, to find my images these days. I experience them first on a light screen and they evolve there. Some of my pictures are transformations; photos of natural objects that I import into Photoshop and some I build from scratch there.

My pictures are closely connected to music (particularly as they relate to harmony). I vertically stack and blend layers, typically using 10-20 layers

in a piece.

I've also discovered a new way to work. As my pictures evolve, I save history states and create new starting points from them. They are like branches extending from the main trunk. These branches are developed in parallel with the original image. I can move motifs back and forth from one file to another and I finish with a family of pictures with a similar essence.

Three recent families I call "Angels", "Light Chord" and "Light Wave".

There are a number of wonderful tools in Photoshop which allow me to generate waves, morph between rectangular and polar coordinates, build spheres and spirals, etc.

My art is opening into a new world today. I find my inner feelings and visions reflected there.

I made pictures from the time I was the tiniest child my parents tell me. Since a career as an artist wasn't honored much in the 50's in America (the two words most associated with artists at the time were starving and crazy), I studied chemistry as a possible career path.

My love for art unexpectedly reawakened in my sophomore year in college and I knew then that my calling was to the senses, particularly to beauty in art and music.

I studied art at the Art Students League in NY during my vacations and went on to get a Masters Degree in art from the University of Hawaii.

I was briefly a partner in a gallery in Greenwich Village in the 60's and moved from there into a 30 year career, designing home textiles.

In evenings and on weekends I pursued my personal art which evolved from painting into photography and then to the digital dimension.

I license some of my floral and leaf images into posters through Editions Limited.

I live in Badger California in the foothills of the Central Sierra. It is a small community of cattlemen, small farmers, semi-retired world class scientists and spiritual devotees.

It is near a spiritual and educational retreat center called Seven Circles Retreat which I helped establish as a manifestation of my spiritual practice which is called Subud.

I expect to see my little town of Badger develop into a "learning community" for new arts, agriculture and science in the future (a probable impossibility). A community that integrates human life.