Artist in His Studio - Robert Lohman, C. 1969

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Artist in His Studio
Robert Lohman, c. 1969

In The Artist in His Studio, Robert Lohman turns the studio into … Read more Artist in His Studio
Robert Lohman, c. 1969

In The Artist in His Studio, Robert Lohman turns the studio into both a physical environment and a portrait of creative consciousness. The work is divided into a loose grid of rectangular compartments. Each section contains its own cluster of shapes, colors, and subjects, while forms repeatedly press against or spill across the boundaries intended to contain them. The central section carries the greatest visual and psychological weight. Within it, a dark face appears near the upper middle, partly enclosed by a large pale-blue circular form. The features are difficult to read, yet the eyes and mouth are distinct enough to establish a human presence. Because the work is titled The Artist in His Studio, this face naturally reads as the artist himself.

Lohman does not present that face as a straightforward self-portrait. It is small, shadowed, and almost buried within the surrounding activity. Broad bands of blue and green extend beside it, while vertical orange marks, pink structural forms, dark lines, and loosely described objects fill the remainder of the panel. The artist seems to be emerging from the studio rather than standing separately inside it. This is an important reversal. In a traditional studio portrait, the artist commands the room. We may see the easel, brushes, paintings, and furniture, but they serve as supporting evidence of the artist’s identity. Here, the environment threatens to consume its maker. Lohman is not the clear master of a controlled workspace. He appears caught inside the visual world he continues to produce.

The uncertain scale of the objects contributes to this mental quality. Some forms appear architectural, while others resemble tools, a desk, flowers, or painted marks. Nothing is held to one dependable size. The studio does not operate according to ordinary perspective because Lohman is showing how creative material feels rather than how it is physically arranged. Across the sheet, the rectangular panels resemble canvases displayed on a wall, works stacked around a studio, or separate mental compartments. The arrangement allows Lohman to present several visual languages at once. One panel may be dominated by organic yellow shapes, another by geometric blue bars, and another by pale green forms that are nearly erased by surrounding washes.

The lower-left panel contains large yellow figures or shapes against a muted green background. A violet circular form interrupts the lower portion, while a smaller yellow-and-purple shape appears near the upper corner. The panel feels active and playful, almost like a painting still deciding what it wants to become.

At the upper right, yellow dominates again, but the mood changes. A large hand-like form descends from above, its broad fingers or rays spread across the center. Nearby, circular marks disrupt the linear markings. A purple oval sits toward the upper right like an eye looking back into the composition. That eye-like form introduces the possibility that the studio itself is watching the artist. Throughout Lohman’s catalog, eyes often carry psychological weight, particularly in works dealing with observation and paranoia. Here, however, the feeling is less political. The watching presence may be the unfinished work itself—the persistent awareness that every canvas demands attention and judgment.

The upper-left panel feels lighter and more botanical. Orange flower-like circles float among green stems, blue passages, and pink washes. A dark blue branching line resembles a small molecular diagram, a plant stem, or a simplified figure. The section could represent still-life material stored within the studio, but it also feels like a study in how visual ideas begin. Lohman does not describe an actual bouquet or plant. Instead, he reduces natural forms to the basic elements that make them recognizable: round blossoms, green leaves, branching lines, and areas of color. The panel feels like the artist testing relationships before they become a finished composition.

The lower-right section is quieter and more unstable. Pale yellow and green washes cover much of the space, while darker marks suggest possible figures, studio tools, furniture, or abandoned studies. A large hand-like or forked form rises near the center, but the surrounding details remain deliberately vague.

This panel has the feeling of something unfinished or partially erased. Its softness contrasts with the stronger color and more definite structure elsewhere. Lohman may be showing different stages of creation across the sheet: some ideas arrive with force and clarity, while others remain faint, unresolved, or destined to disappear. The work’s compartmental structure initially appears orderly, but Lohman repeatedly undermines it. Borders are uneven, forms overlap, and paint bleeds along the divisions. The grid cannot fully control the energy inside it.

That tension between structure and overflow feels central to the studio experience Lohman presents. The artist may organize paintings, tools, and thoughts into separate areas, but creation rarely stays within those categories. One work leads into another. A discarded shape reappears elsewhere. Colors migrate across canvases. The studio becomes a physical record of ideas continuing beyond their intended boundaries.

The palette is unusually varied. Yellow, purple, blue, green, pink, orange, and gray move throughout the composition, but they do not follow a single decorative scheme. Their relationships feel improvised. Certain colors recur across panels, loosely connecting otherwise separate areas.

Purple is particularly effective. It appears as rings, shadows, outlines, and dense accents. Against yellow, it creates strong visual vibration; against blue and gray, it becomes darker and more introspective. Lohman uses it to connect the playful and psychological sides of the work.

Blue provides the clearest structural rhythm. Rectangular bars and striped passages move through the central and left-hand areas, resembling shelves, frames, ladders, windows, or sections of equipment. These shapes give the composition moments of stability, though they never become specific enough to fix the room in physical space.

The watercolor medium is essential to the work. Colors bleed into one another, edges soften, and pigments gather unevenly across the paper. Lohman allows the process of painting to remain visible. Some passages are carefully enclosed, while others spread beyond their outlines.

This openness prevents the work from feeling designed too tightly. Even with its grid, The Artist in His Studio retains the spontaneity of an active workspace. Paint behaves almost like thought: it moves quickly, overlaps previous ideas, and sometimes produces results the artist could not entirely predict.

The black and colored lines introduce a second visual language over the watercolor. These marks define faces, connect objects, and create small moments of emphasis. They behave like drawing laid over painting, or thought attempting to organize sensation.

At the center, these lines become especially dense. The artist’s face, surrounding circle, and nearby objects are drawn more insistently than many of the outer passages. This increased concentration makes the central panel feel like the point where all the surrounding information is being received and processed.

There is also a possible relationship between the grid and comic strips, illustrated manuscripts, or sequences of related images. Each compartment could be one episode in the life of the studio as Lohman moved from one artistic style to another. The viewer moves between them according to color and association rather than chronology.

This fragmented structure reflects the way an artist often experiences ongoing work. Several paintings may be in progress at once, each with its own problems and possibilities. Attention shifts from one to another. A solution found in one piece may suddenly unlock another. The work therefore feels less like a finished portrait of a room than a map of simultaneous creative activity. Lohman shows paintings being imagined, altered, and mentally carried together.

The handwritten title along the edge further reinforces the personal quality of the piece. It feels less formal than a printed caption and more like a note added within the studio itself. The title identifies the subject, but it also anchors an image that might otherwise appear completely abstract.

Dated 1969, the work belongs to a particularly experimental moment in Lohman’s practice. In Electrism, also from that year, sharp planes of color create an almost explosive psychological energy. In Lovers, organic washes surround two joined bodies with a sense of intimacy and protection. The Artist in His Studio brings those opposing tendencies into the same work.

The angular blue bars and structural divisions recall the nervous energy of Electrism, while the soft bleeding colors and rounded forms relate more closely to Lovers. The studio becomes the place where these different visual instincts coexist.

Within Lohman’s broader catalog, the work is especially revealing because it offers insight into how he may have understood his own creative identity. His figures often merge with objects, rooms, machines, or one another. Here, the artist himself merges with the entire studio. Lohman does not elevate himself above the work or present creativity as effortless inspiration. The studio is busy, disorganized, and demanding. There is humor in the small dark face surrounded by enormous shapes, as though the artist is only one more object among the paintings. Yet the work is not self-deprecating in a dismissive way. The central placement gives the artist importance even as the surrounding images overwhelm him. He is the point through which the separate panels connect. The studio may be chaotic, but it is his chaos.

The image also complicates the idea of authorship. Are the surrounding forms products of the artist’s mind, or have they developed an independent life? Several shapes resemble hands, eyes, faces, and bodies, making the paintings around him feel inhabited. The artist creates them, but once created, they look back. This gives the work a subtle psychological tension. The artist is surrounded not merely by objects but by presences. Each unfinished canvas contains possibilities that demand recognition. The studio becomes crowded with identities that do not yet fully exist.

Lohman’s approach feels deeply human because he does not clean up the creative process for presentation. We see the excitement of discovery, but also the accumulation and uncertainty. Not every form becomes meaningful. Not every color resolves into a finished idea. Some sections feel rich and confident; others remain tentative.

That unevenness is precisely what gives the work credibility. An actual studio is not a place where every object is complete and every decision is successful. It is a place where experiments remain visible, where several versions of an idea coexist, and where abandoned work may continue influencing what comes next.

The title The Artist in His Studio sounds almost traditional, recalling a long history of artists depicting themselves among the tools of their profession. Lohman uses that familiar title to deliver something much less conventional. Instead of a recognizable room and dignified self-portrait, he gives us a crowded interior made of color, fragments, and competing images. The true studio may therefore be the mind rather than the room. The panels become separate areas of memory, observation, fantasy, and unresolved thought. The face at the center belongs to the person trying to hold them together.

The Artist in His Studio is both a self-portrait and a portrait of creative labor. Lohman does not define himself through appearance, clothing, or status. He shows himself through the forms that surround and partially consume him. The result is an unusually honest image of the artist—not as a solitary genius presiding over finished masterpieces, but as a person living inside an endless and colorful process of becoming.

-Jonathan Flike

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