Featured Artist Bob Landström

Artist Bob Landström uses crushed volcanic rock as a medium to paint colorful and symbolic metaphysical paintings. Visit his website to learn more.

 

 

I’m a very balanced left brain/right brain kind of a guy. My background and day-in-the-life is essentially equal parts of science and fine art. One person may meet me through my art and another may meet me through my engineering work (another may meet me through ice hockey). When that person learns of the “other skin” that I wear, it’s puzzling to them.

 

 

For me though, it’s all the same. In all my lines of work, I approach things in the same way regardless of the hat I’m wearing at the time. Ideas begin in the conceptual, the abstract, and as they travel toward resolution, they become more concrete and refined. Creativity is present in all things.

 

 

I’ve been a student of metaphysics for most of my adult life. I’m interested in glyphs and symbols from ancient cultures and how these marks have traveled through civilizations, geographies and time. They’re a signal of our “human-ness.” They persist and inhabit our collective subconscious.

 

 

These ideas fuel my own imagery. A sort of mash-up of these symbols with other languages, formulas and spirit animals emerge from this babbling brook of consciousness in my head and take up their life on the canvas.

 

 

My work is rather unique in that I use volcanic rock as a painting medium.

 

 

I’ve been painting with rock for nearly thirty years now. I like the alchemical property of it—once as liquid in the belly of the Earth and now solid in my hands. I’m also an Earth sign, so this is a good fit for me too.

 

 

Over the years I’ve developed and refined numerous techniques for coloring the rock and using it as a painting medium. It’s hard to imagine painting with a liquid now.

 

 

I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At an early age, I was invited to study fine art at Carnegie Institute, and later at Carnegie-Mellon University. Later still I studied at School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. In terms of academic training, I started in a very classical program, and then finished in something that is just the opposite!

 

 

Over the years I’ve traveled quite a bit to Europe, Asia and Central America spending extensive time outside of the United States. One can’t overstate the educational benefits of immersing oneself in a different culture with different languages and different ways of thinking. For me, this has provided tremendous brain food as I go about my work.

 

 

I presently live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, but my work is in public and private collections all over the world.  The comment I most often hear from collectors is that the paintings “just make you feel good.” I couldn’t ask for a better legacy to leave at this time.

 

Artist Bob Landström invites you to follow him on Instagram.

 

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