About the Artist

I paint with my eyes. Painting studies how things reflect and absorb light, reiterating light’s language in paint. My work celebrates the object instead of me, yet each painted thing describes me as I describe it; revealing the mind that selected, the hand that arranged, and the eye that studied it. If I’m patient and observant enough, the process allows anything visible, from an apple to the limitless sky, to confide in me.

Pictures feed our lust for recognizable images, but look beyond the surface! Each imago veils and unveils its essential substance. Tactile objects touch us inside, arousing attachments and remembrances. Depiction itself transforms our ephemeral “earthly belongings” into lasting monuments. The painted likenesses of our artifacts, environments and bodies capture, reveal and transform the deathless memory of our verity in a kind of visual poetry.

Finding the soul in matter is the goal, but I only have to describe in paint how light reflects from surfaces to reveal inner substances. In the painted reflections, may the apples of my eyes still sing songs of sight!

Robert Raymond Mehling

Mehling began drawing when he was ten years old, copying illustrations from books, impressing teachers and parents with his "native" talent.

For decades he remained self-taught. In his twenties and thirties, he illustrated surrealist dreamscapes.

After his father died in 1976, he thought he couldn't afford returning to college to study art, so he worked many years in stores to earn a living.

Mehling didn't enjoy working in stores, so in 1994 he began planning in earnest to become a working professional artist. He bought a camera, copied his photos, and returned to college for professional art degrees.

By 2000, Mehling realized that painting from observation rather than photos or fantasy produced better results. From 2000 to 2003, he learned traditional painting (classical realism) from Robert Armetta at The Long Island Academy of Fine Art in Riverhead.

Mehling's search for a means of expression took him through three kinds of realism: surrealism, photorealism, and classical realism. In all, the realist method has remained constant.

Following the advice of his mentor at Long Island University, Prof. Neill Slaughter, Mehling began teaching and found it almost as rewarding as painting itself. In 2009 he got an MFA from LIU to teach college and share what he knows with younger painters.

Mehling's personal journey has been a story of struggles, setbacks and successes-but he would add: for an artist there is no greater earthly reward than simply being able to paint.