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Robert
Birbeck at work in his studio.
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As
a young man Robert Birbeck didn’t dream of being an
artist. He wanted to be
an architectural draftsman and yachtsman. He loved boats,
and says he literally grew up in boat yards on the Florida
Keys. “I worked summers and weekends in a boat yard
throughout high school,” he says, noting as a matter of
fact that, “anybody who grew up in Florida loved
boats.” He was no exception.
Hoping to pursue a career in boat design he
traveled to Boston after a four year stint in the Air Force
and worked at John Alden & Co. for a while until it
went out of business. Ironically, were it not for Alden’s
bad luck, Birbeck’s good fortune might not have occurred
at all. Unable to find a school that provided courses in
yacht rendering, he enrolled at the New
England School of Art and took courses in architectural
rendering, instead, “and never looked back.” His
attraction to the visual arts developed gradually over a
period of
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four years, a time during which he says, he
“developed a lifelong love for the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts.” If he didn’t start out seeking a career
as an artist, he came to it eventually, naturally, on
his own, the best way.
Still enamoured by the water,
however, and disappointed that his dream of designing
grand yachts didn’t come to fruition, Birbeck headed
back to Florida after Boston where he pursued both
interests: sailing and painting.
A
sailor’s life, a vagabond’s existence.
For much of nearly two decades of his life,
Birbeck lived the life of a vagabond with a penchant for
both drawing and sailing and having a good time. His
first and only boat was a rotted, thirty foot 1901 motor
sail that in its best days was used to haul vegetables
from New Jersey to Manhattan. But to Birbeck the artist,
it was “home”. He prettied her up and named her,
appropriately enough, “Beamish Girl”, because of her
girth ― an attraction that has carried over to his
work today.
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A freelance artist
with portfolio, living in artist colonies wherever he found them, making
just enough money to pay his bills, care for his boat, replenish his art
supplies, then sail on to the next port, Birbeck was comfortable with
himself and exceptionally good as an artist. As a street artist, for
example, working the Florida Keys, his work was noticed by gallery
owners who thought his work good enough that they invited him in to do
portraits in their lobbies. “I did a huge show called Key
West People,” he says, “and did portraits of everybody from the
mayor to Captain Tony’s.” The show was a well-merited success and
the work proved steady. He wasn’t earning big money, but his art was
selling and his reputation as an accomplished portrait artists grew.
While locals and
visitors enjoyed his portraits, and galleries saw merit in what he did,
one place he didn’t expect to see his artwork was in someone else’s
boat, especially a watercolor he threw into the water four months
earlier. He explains how that occurred this way.
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©"STRETCHING NUDE",
limestone, 18"ht., by Robert
Birbeck
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“Every morning before we’d sail [Bob
and his wife, Karin] I’d do a watercolor. If I liked
it, I’d keep it, and if I didn’t like it I’d float
it off the back of the boat. It was either a floater or
a keeper.” Well, one day on their way back from
Washington D.C., they docked at Beaufort, South
Carolina. In the course of their stay they were invited
aboard a 60-foot motor yacht for refreshment and
socializing. “We
were walking around inside the cabin and there was one
of my floaters hanging on the wall,” Birbeck muses,
noting the surprise he felt over how well the watercolor
held up after being dragged in salt water for God only
knows how many miles before it slipped its string and
disappeared into the ocean. He never mentioned anything
to the owners about the painting being his work,
figuring it would only embarrass his guests to think
they were displaying one of his “floaters”.
Birbeck
lived from boat to artist colony throughout the
seventies to about the mid eighties. He was so committed
to the sailor/vagabond life that his wife recalls he
didn’t own a pair of dress shoes or long pants until
she took him shopping and saw to it that he bought some.
Birbeck loved Florida, balmy warm weather, his boat, and
a good time. When he did travel north, his trips
occurred during summer months. It was on one of those
visits that he met, fell in love with and married Karin.
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©"EBONY
VENUS", wall hanging,
ebonized wood, 41"ht.,
by Robert
Birbeck
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Enter Karin:
The year was 1984.
Birbeck came to New York, rented a Dodge van and headed for Woodstock,
where he was invited to show his work at the Ann
Leonard Gallery located in the western part of the state. There were
good things about living the life he led and, as he readily
acknowledges, not so good things about it, too. To the extent Birbeck
had roots they were always being, well, uprooted. A single man,
traveling freely around, there were temptations, and he succumbed to
some of them, and at times may have even lost his direction. But he
always came back to painting, and as his trip to New York State once
again proved, there were galleries anxious to show his work.
As Birbeck notes,
working as an artist provided an income, but not enough to accomplish
what he sensed he wanted. “Because I was always a starving artists, I
took part time jobs to supplement my income.” The raw talent was
there. He knew that. Buyers knew it. Gallery owners knew it, too. To
really develop that talent, however, he needed something his lifestyle
wasn’t providing: purpose.
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It was while working a part time job, a
residential home for special needs adults in Woodstock, N.Y., that he met
Karin. Karin provided the purpose. “She asked me out to dinner one night,”
he recalls, “and we never separated after that.” In fact, it was a couple
weeks after their first date before Karin even went home to get her clothes.
Karin
quickly became more than just a soul mate and wife; she
became a source of inspiration for his art. She gave him
direction and set his compass, both professionally and
personally. His reliance on her is obvious when you meet
them. Karin is a major player in Bob Birbeck’s life,
today, as she was then. In the early days, he says, he
focused his art almost exclusively on her. He painted
her nude and says most of his early work was of her.
Today, although she has a full time job teaching in
their second hometown of Wells, Vermont, her presence
and influence on his art and on his life is still felt.
Grinding ‘em out took its toll:
For
the next several years, Birbeck worked literally every
day at perfecting his art, showing his work at the Ellen
Harris Gallery in Provincetown where he and Karin
had established a summer home. Birbeck’s nudes and
portraits in oil were recognized as accomplished pieces,
and his stature as an artist was now solidly grounded in
experience.
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Over the
years, the drive to produce more became almost overwhelming,
however. His life had changed dramatically, and if he didn’t
notice it at first, the change was affecting him.
“I was burnt out,” he says of that
period, “and driving Karin crazy”. It was after his show at
the Ellen Harris Gallery
that he says Karin recommended a series of classes at a local
museum on the subject of modeling in clay. Birbeck was
immediately interested in the medium and eager for a change.
“I took the class and never looked back after that. Within a
year I was sculpting full time. I went from painting nudes to
sculpting nudes.”
A self
taught sculptor, Birbeck says he ordered his first set of tools
from a supply store in New York and learned as he went along.
Claw chisels, pointers, filers, heavy
raspers and sandpaper replaced brush and canvas, and the
beginning of a distinguished career as an internationally
respected sculptor began. Today, his work is shown in 27
galleries in 14 states and is carried in a gallery in
Buckinghamshire, England. He has been
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©"Mermaid", Oak, 18",
by Robert
Birbeck
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recognized by peers and has
received numerous awards including the prestigious Knickerbocker
Artists Gold Medal of Honor for Exceptional Merit in 1991, the Leonard J. Meiselman Award in 1997 and 1998, the Amidar
Memorial Award for Stone Sculpture
in 1998, The Cleo Hartwig
Memorial Award in 1994, the Vincent
Glinsky Memorial Award in 1993, and the Maurice
B. Hexter Award in 1992.
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© " Sitting Nude", Limestone, 13",
by Robert
Birbeck
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The
artist today:
Robert
Birbeck today is a shy, quiet-spoken man who clearly enjoys
his work, and shuns interviews. He produces somewhere
between 30 and 35 sculptures a year, from both his studio in
Provincetown and his home in Wells, Vermont. He works seven
days a week at his trade, starting at 5:30 in the morning,
reading until 7, then working until 7 at night. His work is
in all kinds of wood and stone: oak, mahogany, maple, limestone, and sandstone, to name a few. One of his Linden
Wood sculptures, part of his “Red Shoes” collection,
fascinated me so much I purchased it. It’s a highly
polished, incredibly smooth piece that looks mahogany heavy
until you lift it. It’s lighter than what you would expect
from a 25 1/2-inch piece of sculpture. It has presence, and
because of the painted bright red shoes over the feet, it
radiates a whimsical personality that sets it apart from
your average sculptured piece. Its rich brown tone radiates
warmth and style that makes it speak, as good art often
does, to an interested buyer.
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Birbeck’s use of a dash of isolated color on
his sculptures has become a trademark of the artist that
defines this part of his work, outside the medium itself.
His 1999 “Red Shoes” in Linden Wood won him the Leonard
J. Meiselman Award that year.
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Another feature that Birbeck is
incorporating more in his art is clothing in the form of
loosely draped robes and shirts, a style he says he adopted
after visiting the Riemenschneider
Show in New York in 1999. Tilman Riemenschneider was
arguably one of the greatest sculptors of the late Middle
Ages. His work adorned numerous churches, private chapels
and various secular settings in Germany, especially after he
attained the status of master sculptor in 1485. Birbeck says
he became fascinated with “the way the 14th
Century sculptors [Riemenschneider, especially] draped their
saints in robes. Now my models are appearing in robes. This
is a direct result of the Riemenschneider influence.”Interestingly, a finished Robert Birbeck sculptor
starts, not with stone or wood, but with hundreds of photographs
of his subject from every angle. He uses his extensive photo
collection to create new pieces, drawing on the many angles to
capture every nuance of the human form.
That’s perfection.
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©"HIGH
STEPPER", limestone, 18"ht.,
by Robert
Birbeck
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As for “Beamish Girl”,
the boat he called home for so many years,
Birbeck says he sold it to a hotel in Lake
Worth, Florida years ago. “I guess they were
going to use it for their guests. It was an
antique.”
And my Red Shoes? It’s prominently displayed in
my living room, along with other of my art, a
treasure to behold and enjoy for years to come.
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