Artist Robert Hickland, a Los Angeles based painter and native of Palm Beach Florida, has been on a singular path since his father took him to an artist’s loft when he was still a child. He vividly remembers the smells of the paint, the structured chaos, and the possibility of touching another world in that childhood experience – “It changed the course of my life, I knew I was home,” he still remembers.
Another childhood experience – the near total loss of his vision, forced Hickland to view the world and where he fit into it in a way never experienced by most people. He learned to trust vision that came from inside as well as out – and he found his expression in modern art – art that speaks viscerally through images and archetypes, form and color talking the language of the spirit.
Pursuing a vision that has taken a lifetime to focus, the artist has created a catalog of work from no formal training that is commercially already making an impact in the film and artist community in Hollywood and New York, and bypassing the traditional routes of exposure.
From his acclaimed one-man show at the Key Club on the Sunset Strip to selling his impressionistic portrait of Truman Capote to a devotee in New York, Hickland has gone his own way. He has established a reputation of iconoclastic independence with a singular vision telling the story of romantic relationships through the prism of experience.
But the story is in the work. The imagery, the color, the form, the almost primitive raw emotion speaks to the human in all of us.