Dimensions: Approx. 11.5" L x 16.5" H
 
Santa Barbara artist Ronald Robertson was born in Detroit in 1927
to British-Canadian immigrants. Ron's artistic talents were evident
early on, and he went to study in Mexico City and Paris, then at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where his
contemporaries included Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Robert
Rauschenberg, and Dorothea Rockbourne. He earned his degree in
art education from Wayne State University, where he met his future
wife, Helen. For the next several years Ron was employed in Ford
Motor's styling division, and began to produce oil paintings and
watercolors. In 1956 they decided to move their young family to
Japan, where Ron and Helen conducted ethnographic research on a
wide range of Japanese artists and collected their woodblock prints,
stone-rubbings, ceramics and hand-crafted furniture. They wrote
books on Japanese contemporary art and printmaking and Ron
painted and showed at galleries in Tokyo. He began making
woodblock prints and the three-dimensional assemblages that came
to dominate his artwork repertory. A job offer from UCSB brought
the family to Santa Barbara in the fall of 1966. Ron and several
colleagues later founded the short-lived Santa Barbara Art Institute
on the Riviera. He moved on to SBCC where he helped to shape
the printmaking program, and then chair the department. After
retirement in the late 1980s, Ron continued to work and exhibit, a
vital part of the Santa Barbara art community.