WALTER BOBBIE

Walter Bobbie is an actor, director, writer and artistic director has painted privately all his life. His acting career began in the original cast of Broadway’s Grease, through dozens of shows. His Tony Award winning direction of Chicago is celebrating its 26th year on Broadway, and he appeared in last season’s Hulu hit “Dopesick.”
Mr. Bobbie’s private passions are drawing and painting which he has pursued with increased dedication in recent years. Keyes Gallery show is the first public exhibition of Mr. Bobbie’s works.

Walter Bobbie’s new paintings evolve from his earlier anthropomorphic images to an equally sensual response to nature.  Everything from trees and plants to roots and bramble move his curving lines with equal sensuality.  Though these new works continue as poetic abstraction, they are a response to the spiritual path of everything in nature that grows and continues to grow because it must.  Nature has no choice. His inspiration springs from the garden’s mantra: “every bean that’s planted is an act of faith.” Mr. Bobbie’s beans are drawings that sprout unformed.  Drawings that, with attention, refine themselves in unexpected ways to a fertile and unpredictable future on canvas.  Like trees and plants and flowers, his images feel complete in every moment even as they promise what is yet to come.   He thinks of painting as an act of faith.

ARTIST STATEMENT
”On New Years Day 2018, I began drawing in journal that had been a recent gift. I drew spontaneously each morning.  Whatever was in front of me.  On the table. In my mind.  Dreams. Imaginings. One uninspired morning I drew the lineup of talking heads segmented across the screen on MSNBC. My drawing prompt was Paul Klee’s  “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”  So pencil to pad, I walked.  And walked and walked and enjoyed my company more and more.
A lifetime of art was being transformed.  No intimidating canvas loomed before me demanding strong ideas, dazzling technique, breakthroughs.  A pencil was liberating me from imitation, homage, psychological narrative, self-portraits and, well… paint. What bloomed were abstract shapes that felt personal.
One day, I put down that daily journal, turned around to the wall behind my desk and began a large pencil drawing, a knotted scrawl of interlocking curves, shaded into an extremely large mural.  It was a meditation that consumed me for more than a year.  Almost daily, pencil in hand, I went back to the wall behind my desk.
In time my pencil moved onto wood then back to canvas enhanced with colored pencils and inks.  Brushes retuned with acrylics then oils and a new expression which I took public a couple years ago.  This recent journey has been an illumination.  Now, whenever I get lost a #2 Paper Mate returns as my best ally.”