About the Artist

Robbie Reid has devoted her life to art and education. She taught art and art history at Stanford University, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara and Ventura City Colleges, and St. Cloud State University; she earned tenure at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, where she recently retired from online teaching. She has lectured at museums, such as the Legion of Honor and the De Young in San Francisco, as well as at a variety of art galleries.  Reid studied painting and drawing with Richard Heidsieck, Richard Phipps, and other notable West Coast artists. Robbie also attended plein air and studio workshops in Pacific Grove, Carmel, and Pebble Beach, taught by Brian Blood and Laurie Kersey. Several years ago, Reid began painting in acrylic and her subject matter reflects a thoughtful engagement with the Pacific Northwest Coast environment where she currently resides.

Robbie Reid’s passion for art began as a young child, as she observed her grandfather, San Francisco lithographer, Robert A. Reid, execute his wonderfully detailed illustrations and drawings.  Robbie’s enthusiasm for the arts continued through college where she earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Art (University of California, Santa Barbara), receiving a variety of scholarships and awards in the process.  After being awarded a Graduate Fellowship at Stanford University, Reid completed her Ph.D. in Art in 2001, with an emphasis in nineteenth-century American art. Throughout her academic and professional career, Reid has exhibited her paintings in galleries and at faculty art exhibitions. 

Inspired by the natural world, and informed by her dissertation research on Winslow Homer’s late seascapes, as well as her lifelong interest in the arts, Reid continues to produce unique landscapes and coastal scenes, rendered expressively in acrylic and watercolor. The artist's most recent paintings reflect an increasing introspection, partly influenced by pandemic isolation. Her sensitive semi-abstract renderings of trees, whose wounds are partly healed by bark growth, reveal evocative patterns found in all life forms. 

"My paintings are artifacts, the remains of an intimate active engagement with the natural world - water, clouds, land, and vegetation – all observed in a constant state of energetic transformation. In my work I extemporize on transient patterns repeated in nature, from the microscopic to the cosmic. These organic abstractions are my meditation on the transformative and interconnected nature of all life.

My expressive style also offers insights into the paradox of seeing – where a realist attention to detail simultaneously reveals abstractions that evoke and reinvent process-oriented aspects of Abstract Expressionist all-over painting."