September 8, 2004

Robert Flynn

As a kid growing up in Manhasset, N.Y., Robert Flynn was determined to ride his bicycle on every road that traversed his hometown. When he accomplished that goal, he began methodically working his way through the asphalt ribbons of neighboring towns, crossing out the street names on a map he kept with him. This kind of obsessive behavior, Flynn posits, expresses itself in his artwork as an adult, as he exhaustively paints voluminous varieties of cattle, birds, trees and flowers, among other objects, in series that have included as many as 280 individual pieces.

“I am discovering and mapping a course through the world around me,” the Miami artist writes on his Web site, www.robert-flynn.com, “a personal world that draws upon the idea of a diary or a calendar, all the while still trying to lose myself in the landscape.”

Flynn chronicles the world around him in styles that range from impressionistic to hyperrealistic. His recent Garden Variety series features several different kinds of flowers, some of which seem to echo the dreamy, blurry images of Claude Monet as well as the erotically charged flora depicted by Georgia O’Keeffe. Also depicted in that series and perhaps nodding in the direction of David Hockney or Eric Fischl, is a somewhat unsettling, voyeur’s-eye view of an unoccupied lounge chair, as glimpsed through foliage and a chainlink fence in an anonymous suburb.

Other paintings in the series picture leafy tree canopies in mesmerizing views from below. Flynn manages to capture the vertiginous effect of looking up at them, maybe after spinning around in place as a little kid would, or perhaps passing by them on a bike or in a car. In yet another piece, water gushes from an unseen source — a fountain? a garden hose? — the droplets painted with great virtuosity against an azure sky and fruit trees that set the scene definitively in South Florida.

Flynn’s Palmistry series will also resonate with locals, presenting a number of palm trees, viewed from a distance, against skies of differing blue hues. He renders the trees’ crowns from dead-calm to dramatically tousled by impending storm winds.

However, Flynn’s mania for completeness can truly be detected in his 2001 Peep series. Against brightly painted canvases of orange, yellow and red, he meticulously details a stunning array of finches, blue jays, sparrows, hummingbirds and birds of every stripe and color. The individual birds dissolve into patterns, almost like wallpaper, wrapping paper or perhaps a really cool tie.

Maintaining a studio and a family home in Miami, the latter of which he was busy securing against Hurricane Frances when we attempted to reach him last week, Flynn has seen his paintings snapped up for corporate collections from the Bahamas to Massachusetts and by private art lovers from Switzerland and the Netherlands to Vail, Colo., where Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer and his wife, Camille, apparently hang Flynn’s work.

— Bob Weinberg