Today we’d like to introduce you to Robert Decker.
Hi Robert, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I have always been interested in art. I remember drawing and painting at the kitchen table when I was very young. I was always interested in monsters. The old movies were on TV every weekend: the classic Universal monsters and Godzilla and all of those, as well as Star Trek and science fiction movies and TV shows. I drew that stuff, I even had dreams about dinosaurs and aliens and monsters. When I went to college, it was for art. There I obtained a degree in painting, but a funny thing happened along the way: I never lost interest in the monsters and aliens and things like that, but I gained a love of landscape and traditional subject matter and spent the next 25 years or so pursuing that, occasionally selling a piece or two, and eventually belonging to a gallery for several years. The one thing missing from that narrative is that right out of college I also made granite monuments and tombstones. I learned how to etch my art n grave markers for our clients, and I drew just about everything you can imagine, from dart boards to Ford trucks pulling trailers and full-blown scenery. I tell people sometimes that my work is on permanent public displays across the north-central United States. Around that time and until I moved to South Carolina I mainly worked in pencil, colored pencil and pastel, and sometimes acrylic because the places I lived in were small one-bedroom apartments and I didn’t want to be breathing all of the chemicals associated with oil painting.
When I moved to South Carolina I bought a house and with that came the freedom to explore oil paints which I fell in love with, and later on Gouache, which is still one of my favorite mediums. While I lived in South Carolina, I met my future wife. A few years ago, we moved to Atlanta for her job. We got married, bought our first house together, and put our houses back in SC on the market a few days later…talk about a crazy time! Shortly after arriving in Atlanta, I took a few classes at SCAD and learned more about the digital side of things and more about contemporary layout and composition as well as professional processes and then I jumped right into it, opening an Etsy shop (or two!) and working for a place that does t-shirt design. Now I am a Freelance Illustrator and Designer looking to use my skills to create a decent living for myself. I show my digital work, mostly comic, fantasy, and science fiction based at comic conventions, and have recently been feeling the pull to create more traditional works to get back to the gallery scene. And of course, I am working on my own IP project.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth road? What is that? it’s definitely been a bumpy ride! The biggest struggles have always been time and content. As in, after I spend a couple of months painting a series and fine-tuning everything, will anyone be interested in it? I went back to the drawing board several times to figure that out. I still go back to figure (or refigure) that out on a regular basis. I am also constantly trying to improve what I do, whether it be a process, skill level, or even just the speed at which I create a final product, and part of that all comes down to focus. There are so many bright shiny distractions out there it can be hard to stay on topic when you are working by yourself. I never had that problem when I worked for someone else. I think the other really big challenge has been finding an audience for what I like to do. My foray into the world of comics has been fun, and I finally think I am finding that audience, but I also suspect that the search for an audience will never end, only expand.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The largest part of my body of work over the last few years has been portraiture. I have been doing portraits of movie and television characters, actors, and well-known people, and they have been well-accepted! I have been told on multiple occasions that people think the portraits I paint are photographs when they see them at a distance. Some people think they are even when they get close up! While I take it as a compliment, I truly am not trying to make a photo-realistic image, but I do want it to look like the person I am painting. if you do get close enough, you will notice that in my skin tones, there are greens, blues, purples, reds, and other non-skin colors, but they all blend to make a realistic portrait. last year, at the first Comic Convention I ever did, one of the other vendors who specialized in black and white drawings (he had hundreds of them) told me that I was the best artist there! That was very exciting and while I was thrilled to hear that, I still feel like I have a lot to learn.
I think that what sets me apart is my attention to detail, and my willingness to devote the time to get it right. I have a few portraits that will never again see the light of day. They just were not what I thought they needed to be, so I put them away and started fresh! Recently I have started to expand out from portraits, betting into more full-body poses and images that are aiming towards a more movie-poster sort of vibe, with more than one portrait/person in them. I have also been developing my own IP, which is not a portrait-based project.
What matters most to you?
That’s not an easy answer. Sometimes I am not sure what it is, but there has always been an overwhelming need to create. As I have gotten older, I think the need for freedom in what I create and freedom in regards to my time and how I spend it creating has also become very important. When I was younger, I could work a job all day in a non-creative field and come home and create for a few hours, but as I got older, that became less tolerable. Maybe I feel like the clock is ticking and I don’t have the luxury of time the same as when I was 23 years old. I think the other thing, and this has only started to recently become evident to me, is the need to experiment. I don’t want to get stuck in a rut, I want to explore new and different ways of approaching a subject, or new subjects and find ways to bring those into my workflow and body of work while painting something cohesive. I had a friend many years ago who used to say, “That which is green grows, that which is ripe rots.” I don’t know who he was quoting, but it has stuck with me all these years.
Pricing:
- My small prints start at $10.00
Contact Info:
- Website: www.robertdeckerillustrator.com
- Instagram: robertdeckerillustrator
- Youtube: Robert Decker
- Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertDeckerStudios
