Rob Loebell
Bloomfield , Connecticut
I have been a sculptor for over 45 years. I work primarily in wood, recently focusing on relief carvings. My home is in Bloomfield CT.
Message
I was born in Philadelphia. I attended Central High School, (sharing that with Thomas Eakins). I earned a BFA and an M.ED from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. I am primarily a wood sculptor, focusing on relief carvings using different types of wood. I explore surface designs using burning and encaustic. I have exhibited widely at venues throughout New England, New York, and my native Philadelphia. Recently, my work was exhibited at the William-Scott Gallery in Provincetown, First Street Gallery in New York, the New Britain Museum of American Art’s exhibition Nor’Easter, and in Short Stories at the Canton Artists’ Guild Gallery on the Green. I am also a longtime member of the New York Sculptors Guild and Silvermine Guild of Artists and First Street Gallery in New York. I live and work in Bloomfield, CT with my fiancée and Peke ‘Princess Diana Queen of Hearts’.
Statement
Photographs are flat representations of the three-dimensional world. They freeze a moment in time, and capture a specific place, activity, person or group. In my relief carvings, I return flat images to three dimensions. These sculptures reference home, travel, responses to events, and the frozen moments I’ve captured moving through environments not my own. I begin by taking pictures, or combing through an archive to chose pictures, and then curating them into a visual story. The pieces are carved, burned and painted to suggest their sources- black and white or color photographs- but they are not reproductions. Through this transformation, the photographs become more like memories. Even in the most recent, more topical pieces, I have tried to suggest a more universal meaning. The sculptures reimagine the fixity or flexibility of time by swapping the original medium for wood, and then recreating the images themselves into a new form.