Artist's show combines Panhandle landscapes and still life paintings

“To me the landscape is very much like a still life,” said Smith. “When I go out there and I see things like barns, and when I look at a table with objects on it…there’s a real connection.”

Smith will be exploring that connection in a show that will open in May at the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center on the Chadron State College campus.

In 2010, after working for 10 years as the instructional design coordinator at Chadron State College, Smith retired to devote all of his time to painting and other pursuits, including playing the banjo.

He has been painting since 1960, and said he fell in love with the beauty of the Panhandle landscape when he was a Nebraska Arts Council artist-in-residence at schools in the area in 1982. His oil paintings are in prominent public collections, including the Sheldon Memorial Gallery at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and with many private collectors, including famed Nebraska investor Warren Buffet in Omaha.  

Smith has painted many landscapes and still-life scenes in the past, but said the works in this show represent a new take on the forms.

“I currently find the motifs of structures in the landscape, coupled with still life containing similar shapes, intriguing,’ he said.

It was the public toilets at Toadstool Park, north of Crawford, Nebraska, that led Smith to explore on canvas the idea of landscape as still life.  

“I went out to Toadstool and here are these beautiful (landscape) forms but the toilets were put there by the government and have a certain look about them,” said Smith. “They sit somewhat apart and when you look at them in the context of the landscape around them, these are completely alien forms.”

Back at his studio in Chadron, Smith realized these object sitting in the landscape look a lot like a still-life on a table.

To illustrate the connection, he painted the Toadstool scene with the toilets, and then set simple objects to mimic the shape and color of the generic buildings on a table and painted that.

“I’ve never done anything like this before and I just stumbled on it,” he said.

Other structures in the wide-open high plains countryside, like the silos at the grain-loading complex north of Chadron, inspired other pairs of paintings Smith is creating for the show. Tin cans of food, stripped of their labels, made ideal forms for a still life that corresponds to the landscape painting of the silos by the railroad track, he said.

All of the works in the show will be the same size and shape, 40” wide by 18” tall, and will be hung at the same level, said Smith, who has an extensive collection of paintings both large and small from his long career as an artist.

“I want a very sparse show. I don’t want a lot of paintings for the sake of having a lot of paintings,” he said. “I’m interested in people seeing what I’m doing now.”

Smith has been featured at the Sandoz Center previously, although the gallery doesn’t often show local artists’ work, said Sarah Polak, center director.

“Typically in winter the exhibits tie into the college curriculum,” she said. “We try to do some things in summer that are related to western history and culture. Robin’s work fits nicely with that. We are excited to have him coming.”

Smith’s show, titled “Northwest Nebraska Places and Things,” opens May 20 and will be on display until Aug. 12.

The Sandoz Center is open from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. For more information about the exhibit, contact Sarah Polak at 308-432-6401.