Robert Genn
Encyclopedia
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, who has gained recognition for his style
Painting style
In the visual arts, style is a "...distinctive manner which permits the grouping of works into related categories." or "...any distinctive, and therefore recognizable, way in which an act is performed or an artifact made or ought to be performed and made." It refers to the visual appearance of a...
, which is in the tradition of Canadian landscape painting
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
.
Life and work
Robert Genn was born in Victoria, British ColumbiaVictoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of British Columbia, Canada and is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of about 78,000 within the metropolitan area of Greater Victoria, which has a population of 360,063, the 15th most populous Canadian...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
to an English mother and Scottish father. In 1940, age four, whilst travelling in his grandfather's Hupmobile coupe through Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, he saw an elderly woman sitting outside, painting a bridge, and said, "Look, Papa, an artist". His grandfather informed him that "Some people think she's crazy" and that she was Emily Carr
Emily Carr
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a post-impressionist painting style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her work until later in her life...
, an artist whom Genn has credited as a significant influence on his later work.
Group of Seven (artists)
The Group of Seven, sometimes known as the Algonquin school, were a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920-1933, originally consisting of Franklin Carmichael , Lawren Harris , A. Y. Jackson , Franz Johnston , Arthur Lismer , J. E. H. MacDonald , and Frederick Varley...
. In 1961, he met Lawren Harris
Lawren Harris
Lawren Stewart Harris, CC was a Canadian painter. He was born in Brantford, Ontario and is best known as a member the Group of Seven who pioneered a distinctly Canadian painting style in the early twentieth century. A. Y. Jackson has been quoted as saying that Harris provided the stimulus for the...
who was a neighbour in Point Grey, Vancouver. Genn had problems with painting skies, and Harris's advice was to turn the picture upside-down: "Paint down from the trees to the clouds at the bottom of the picture to get the perspective right." Genn said this was "valuable advice", which enabled him "to control the gradation, and work up into the trees in a more abstract manner."
He runs the Painter's Keys web site, a worldwide artists' community, with his staff and volunteers. This sends out an erudite free twice-weekly newsletter, which is sent to 135,000 artists in over 100 countries, and claims the largest collection of art quotes online with over 5,382 authors quoted. His "Ten Commandments of Art Pricing" on his web site (reprinted on About.com
About.com
About.com is an online source for original information and advice. It is written in English, and is aimed primarily at North Americans. It is owned by The New York Times Company....
) advise starting cheaply, raising prices slowly, keeping them the same for all purchasers and pricing by size.
Genn has been a member of the Board of Directors at Emily Carr College of Art & Design.
Books
Genn has written three books. In Praise of Painting (1981) is an illustrated autobiography of his early years. The Dreamway (1991) is an account of a meeting with a spiritual seer. The Painter's Keys (1999) is a handbook for painters based on one of his creativity seminars.Representation and collections
As of 2007, 155 works have auction sales. His work is represented by 12 galleries in Canada. Solo shows include Jenkins Showler Gallery, White Rock;West End Gallery, Edmonton; The Art Emporium, Vancouver; and Canada House Gallery, Banff, AB. He is one of the 60 elected senior members (SFCA) of the Federation of Canadian Artists (FCA).
His work is in corporate and public collections, including Air Canada, Bank Of Montreal, Canadian General Insurance, Canadian Airlines, Canadian Utilities, The Churchill Corporation, Expo '86, Esso Resources, First City - California II, Highfield Oil & Gas, Molson Brewery Ltd., Montreal Trust, Shell Resources, University of Alberta, Westgate Chevrolet, Glenbow Museum and Government of Belgium.