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Fish and Fan Coral
Oil on canvas • 36" x 54"
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French Angel Fish
Oil on canvas • 48" x 48"
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Spotted Eagle Ray
Oil on canvas • 36" x 48"
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Forms of Coral
Oil on canvas • 36" x 48"
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Reef at Haulover, St. John
Oil on canvas • 66" x 46"
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New Growth, Old Growth
Oil on canvas • 54" x 36"
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Near the Surface
Oil on canvas • 42" x 54"
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Coral Formations
Oil on canvas • 60" x 48"
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Staghorn Coral
Oil on canvas • 54" x 48"
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Sea Turtle
Oil on canvas • 66" x 48"
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Nurse Shark at Pelican Rock
St. John
Oil on canvas • 66" x 42"
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Twin Coves, Eleuthera
Oil on panel • 14 1/2" x 35 1/2"
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Upper Peter Bay, St. John
Oil on panel • 17 1/2" x 35 1/2"
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Slew at Lamshur, St. John
Oil on panel • 20" x 16"
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Ruin at Lamshur, St. John
Oil on panel • 20 1/2" x 20"
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Big Wind
Oil on panel • 19 1/2" x 25 3/4"
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Caneel Beach, St. John
Oil on panel • 12 1/4" x 16"
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Old Club Med Beach, Eleuthera
Oil on panel • 22 1/2" x 28"
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Ram's Head, St. John
Oil on panel • 21" x 26 1/2"
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Lighthouse Point, Eleuthera
Oil on panel • 16" x 20"
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Fauna and Flora
Found, carved and painted wood • 20 1/2" x 20" x 42"
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Robert Tharsing is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art
at the University of Kentucky. He was born in Santa Monica, California,
and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967
with BA and MA degrees. He married Ann Tower in 1973 and they have
a daughter, Lina.
Tharsing is known for the breadth of his artwork, making both
abstract and representational paintings and sculpture. He has been
the recipient of many awards, including the Phelan Prize at the
University of California at Berkeley, and the Al Smith Fellowship,
presented by the Kentucky Arts Council. In 1998, Tharsing was the
subject of a profile produced by Kentucky Educational Television
entitled Master of Art: Robert Tharsing, and in 1999-2000,
he conceived, hosted and co-directed a series for KET entitled "Looking
at Painting."
Tharsing's work has been shown regionally, nationally, and internationally
and is included in many private and public collections, such as
the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Kentucky Clinic and the
College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington,
KY; the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; the Huntington Museum
of Art, Huntington, WV; Dollar General Corporate Offices, Goodlettsville,
TN; Alabama Power Company, Birmingham, AL; and the Owensboro Museum
of Fine Art, Owensboro, KY.
I am fascinated by the wealth of possibilities
of what painting can be, as well as by what it has been. Artists
of the past have established the boundaries, much as early explorers
mapped the continents, but we are still finding new ways to make
paintings and likewise, we continue to learn about the Earth and
our place in it. I see painting as the search for meaning -- the
meaning of the painting and the meaning of life.
I am interested in a variety of ideas
regarding the nature of painting, and I have developed several ways
of working to address these ideas by using realism, abstraction,
and often a mixture of both. Color and the processes I use to arrive
at an image are the common threads that run through my work.
These recent paintings, begun in November
of 2004, were inspired by trips to Eleuthera in the Bahamas and
St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In these places there exists
a delicate ecology between organisms above and below the water's
surface that I find to be beautiful and mysterious.
The sculpture, made mostly last summer,
was constructed from driftwood that I collected along the shore
of our island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. The animated shapes of
roots, limbs and other wood debris suggest certain creatures that
I assemble and paint in order to reveal what I see in the wood.
Robert Tharsing, 2005
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