Artist Focus: Robert Abbott

Robert Abbott's landscapes blend keen observation with post-painterly abstraction, influenced by a deep relationship to the agricultural terrain he paints.

Both a farmer and an artist, Robert Abbott paints the crops, vehicles, and buildings that populate farms on California's Central Coast. In Full Moon, Stuck Truck, hills lit by the setting sun watch over a truck stuck in a ditch and tucked into the shadows: a moment of transition and resignation divides the 36x36-inch oil painting into warm remains of the day and cool colors of fading light.

Abbott does not just observe the landscape; he transforms it. As a farmer, he creates practical land art that results in rows of ochre sprouting into greens and yellows. As an artist, he deconstructs the parts and rebuilds them into paint, emphasizing patterns and shapes that form the farmland seen from a particular viewpoint.

Arcs in Tricky Cultivation, chevrons in Windrows After Rain, rhythmic stripes in Rincon Looking West, and blobs of green and salmon growing along the Geranium Fence Line — all join painterly abstraction to plein-air realism.

Abbott never forgets the mountains and foothills that bind us to the coast. He minimizes depth by using a flat monochromatic palette. Shapes stack on top of each other rather than recede. Colors that echo from foreground to background and then to the sky flatten the space in From Alma Rosa and Zaca Peak.

In Backlit Hills, grey-blues and purples reluctantly describe a distant mountain and ocean above blotchy green hills. But in Receding Green, Marin he compresses space still further by forcing the texture of gesso on board to show through thinly applied muted color — a wave of olive green cutting across the plane.