Robin Weiss grew up in Ohio and began drawing early, but the practice became something more deliberate under the mentorship of his high school art teacher Louis Penfield. Penfield’s estate in northeast Ohio was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; they hauled stone from the Chagrin River to work on an unfinished Wright-designed studio on the property, drew and painted from life in class and on weekends, constructed found-metal sculptures. That grounding in looking and making — with close attention to material and place — has stayed in his work. During his time in the US Navy he painted ship scenes in watercolor. He later relocated to Washington, studied architectural engineering at Olympic College alongside art coursework, and eventually made the decision to paint full time.
In Day Sailer, the composition anchors itself in a dark foreground—blacks and deep browns defining wooden pilings and their reflections—while pale cream-colored boats with cream sails occupy the middle distance against a band of bright cerulean water. Weiss applies paint with deliberate opacity in the foreground, allowing it to sit thickly on the canvas, then thins her application toward the background where the evergreen shoreline softens into atmospheric suggestion. The painting's spatial recession feels somewhat compressed, with the boats pushed forward despite their distance, creating a tension between intimate harbor detail and distant landscape that gives the work an almost claustrophobic intimacy. The artist treats her subject matter with painterly directness rather than prettiness—this is a working marina captured without sentimentality, its geometry of masts and mooring posts as important as any romantic notion of sailing life. He is a plein air painter working in oil, based in Poulsbo on the Kitsap Peninsula. The subjects are the ones directly around him: Liberty Bay in morning light, working boats at Kingston Marina, old barns on North Kitsap farms, blue herons hunting the waterfront rocks, the specific quality of afternoon light on water and weathered wood that defines the Kitsap coast. In 2006 he joined the daily painters movement — inspired by Duane Keiser and Julian Merrow Smith — and the discipline of sustained output transformed his painting. He attends workshops regularly and has studied under Darrell Anderson, Jim Lamb, and Ned Mueller. He paints and teaches at Knowles Studio in Poulsbo alongside printmaker Leigh Knowles Metteer.
His awards include Best in Show at the Central City Plein Air competition in 2018, First Place at the Winslow Plein Air in 2017, Spirit of the Peninsula Award at Paint the Peninsula in 2016, and Best of Show plus Artists’ Choice at Paint the Peninsula in 2015. His work has been published in Plein Air Magazine, City Living, the Longborough Festival Opera UK publication, and the book Daily Painters: Color, Obsession and Joy. He has shown internationally at Art in the Open in Wexford, Ireland. His paintings are in private and corporate collections worldwide.
I am often stopped in my tracks when the light at certain times of day hits an object or landscape and makes it come alive with color. It’s all about the light. One of the missions and traditions for us plein air painters is to document visually the history of our local area. I have paintings of old barns that have disappeared from the landscape years ago but will live on at least on the canvas of this wandering artist.
