Calligraphic Nothern Bobwhite - Robert Lohman, C. 1981

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Calligraphic Nothern Bobwhite*
Robert Lohman, c. 1981

Robert Lohman’s Calligraphic Northern Bobwhite, presents the bird not through naturalistic description, but … Read more Calligraphic Nothern Bobwhite*
Robert Lohman, c. 1981

Robert Lohman’s Calligraphic Northern Bobwhite, presents the bird not through naturalistic description, but through movement, rhythm, and linear transformation. The work is executed in watercolor and drawn media on a light rice paper support, with the image unfolding across the sheet as a sequence of curved contours, translucent washes, and suspended color fields. While the title identifies the subject as a Northern Bobwhite, Lohman does not approach the bird as an ornithological specimen. Instead, he treats it as an occasion for abstraction: the bobwhite becomes a calligraphic structure, a living arrangement of arcs, plumes, wing-like planes, and directional energies.

Calligraphic Northern Bobwhite spreads laterally, as though the bird has been caught mid-motion or partially dissolved into flight. The left side suggests a head and neck, with an elongated, almost mask-like profile formed through red, green, and gray lines. This avian identity is present but deliberately amorphous. The beak, eye, crest, and throat are reduced to signs rather than descriptive features, allowing Lohman to move between recognition and invention.

The central and right portions of the sheet are dominated by broad, curving forms that read as wings, tail feathers, or the visual echo of motion. These passages do not lock into a single literal anatomy. Instead, they create a fluid syntax of avian movement. The looping blue-green arc at the upper right, the pale blue feathered mass beside it, and the peach-orange striated planes across the composition all suggest an artist interested less in the bird’s fixed body than in the forces that animate it: lift, turn, flutter, and directional release.

Color plays a central structural role. Lohman uses a light palette of coral, peach, yellow, pale green, aqua, violet, and blue, allowing the pigments to remain transparent and atmospheric. The orange and peach passages read almost like notation or feather patterning, while the cooler greens and blues establish the bird’s skeletal rhythm. The red accents are particularly important. They sharpen the composition, giving emphasis to the head, crest, and central angular forms. Without these red lines, the image might drift into decorative softness. With them, the work gains tension and graphic authority.

There is also a sculptural logic beneath the apparent delicacy of the piece. Lohman’s forms do not float randomly across the page. They interlock through counterweights: the elongated head at left balances the rounded blue mass at right; the lower left peach form answers the lower right peach plane; the central violet-blue vertical element acts almost as a hinge between the two halves of the image. These structural relationships suggest Lohman’s broader training as a sculptor. Even when working in watercolor, he appears to think in terms of balance, extension, and spatial pressure.

The open white ground is essential. It gives the bird room to breathe, but it also intensifies the sense of incompletion. The image does not fill the page; it activates it. This use of negative space keeps the work from becoming illustrative. The blank areas are not passive background but part of the composition’s visual rhythm. They allow the colored forms to feel suspended, as though the bird exists in a brief interval between gesture and disappearance.

Stylistically, Calligraphic Northern Bobwhite can be situated within a late modernist approach to natural subject matter, where the observable world is not copied but translated into an abstract language of line, color, and motion. Lohman’s bird is not sentimental wildlife art, nor is it purely decorative abstraction. It occupies a more interesting middle ground: the subject remains legible, but the true content of the work is the act of transformation. The Northern Bobwhite becomes a field of visual notation, a creature reconstructed through gesture.

-Jonathan Flike

*The title of this work was assigned by Visard Gallery.

About the Artist
Robert Lohman was an American artist associated with Indiana modernism, recognized as both a sculptor and painter. The National Gallery of Art identifies Lohman as an American artist, 1919–2001, and holds examples of his 1966 bronze medallic work created with the Medallic Art Company in its collection.

Lohman worked across a wide range of media, including watercolor, oil, wood, plaster, ceramics, and bronze. Biographical sources identify him as a portrait and figure sculptor as well as a painter, with formal study at the John Herron Art Institute, Cranbrook, and Yale. He assisted the noted sculptor Carl Milles at Cranbrook Academy and later served as Director of Fine Arts at Cranbrook from 1947 to 1949. Lohman also taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the Indianapolis Art League, where he remained connected to art education and regional modernist practice.

His work often moves between figuration and abstraction, reflecting the eye of a sculptor and the freedom of a modernist draftsman.

Underrepresented Artist Information
Robert Lohman may also be understood within the broader history of underrepresented LGBT artists in the American Midwest. Documentary records connect him closely with Jerrol T. Davis of Indianapolis, who served as Secretary-Treasurer of Robert Lohman, Inc.; Davis’s obituary confirms his role in Lohman’s company, and later memorial sources identify him as Lohman’s spouse. While historical records from this period often leave same-sex relationships only partially documented, the available evidence points to a significant personal and professional partnership that adds important context to Lohman’s life and legacy. See less