I now own four of his paintings, but this kind of stuffy collector language feels silly to use. People at his shows are always smiling, because it’s impossible to be art-gallery-serious around this work.
By Margret Grebowicz
Robert Harris is a painter, and, according to some, the most well-known unknown artist in Western NY. He’s an outsider artist, and a character on the Buffalo scene–very short, with long, curly hair and big eyes, and a removed personality. He mass-produces smallish, angry paintings, often featuring profanity, priced to sell.
When I went to my first Robert opening and saw paintings that looked like they had been made by a troubled child, I expected a funny, dynamic person to match. Surely, this was all a joke? I paid $100 for a bright painting of a frowning girl who looked like Wednesday Addams holding a glass of milk, with “Fuck off” scrawled behind her on a wall. Robert was mostly silent while I fumbled with Venmo. I pointed to the frowning girl and said, proudly, “that’s me.” He answered, “I know,” without cracking a smile.
I don’t think there’s any way to “get at” Robert except though the paintings, but not in some psychoanalytical way. There is a tension between the quality of the work, or Robert’s skill level, on one hand, and the fact that he has somehow managed to create a whole art scene around himself, on the other. He is on to something—though, like many artists, he’s not the best person to explain what that is. Are his fans delusionally following him around, hoping to have found the next big outsider artist? Is this work actually good? Does he think it’s good? He’s a bit of a cipher, so I’d like to write a profile of Robert that tells readers about him through things that others say about him and the work.
I now own four of his paintings, but this kind of stuffy collector language feels silly to use. People at his shows are always smiling, because it’s impossible to be art-gallery-serious around this work. The friend who introduced us likes to say that talking to Robert is like trying to have a conversation with a dog: nothing will come of it, but at least you know what to expect. Robert doesn’t like to text, so we speak on the phone sometimes and he always returns, unprompted, to the theme of his mother’s death. She comes up every time, and I suspect this is the case for all of his conversations, across the board. He has never asked me a question about myself.
It took Robert months to send me the painting I had bought from him, “Fritos and Whiskey,” his only entry into one of his last group shows in Buffalo. I was sure I was never going to get it, and I convinced myself that that was fine. It’s not like it cost a lot, and, I mean, look at this thing—was I really going to display this in my house? What was I thinking, spending my heard-earned money on stuff like this?
I knew that Robert hadn’t had a drink in a couple of years, and I too was taking a break. The last thing I needed was a painting celebrating bar culture. But when it arrived, it was at a particularly difficult time—right before the winter holidays–and it opening it, I felt like angels were smiling down on me. There was no question that it was exactly what my life needed at that moment, and I couldn’t find a central enough place in my apartment where displaying it would do it justice. I suddenly couldn’t imagine a world in which it wasn’t mine.
I’ve heard that his studio is so packed wall to wall with paintings that it’s impossible to move through. I sense, though he’s reluctant to admit it, that he’s living in a commercial space. Often, when we call, I can hear the beep of the smoke alarm in the background, asking for new batteries. He is happiest in New York City, but hates the art museums unless he knows where the exit is. He never learned how to drive. He travels often, staying with friends and painting during the trip, so that he can sell the pieces on Instagram and afford his train ticket back to Buffalo.
The paintings are political, to be sure—portraits of James Baldwin and Pee Wee Herman, as well as women telling the state to stay the fuck away from their bodies. But, more than that, there’s something political in the very act of obsessively painting his motifs over and over—a dumpster on fire with “fucking shitshow” painted on it, or a paper coffee cup that reads “fuck thoughts and prayers” where the name should be, self-portraits in which he is masked, his mother. And there’s something political about the normalcy of it all. The paintings are simple, cheap, he churns them out by the hundreds, and the people who buy them are not collectors. He also sells his work directly on Instagram, and it sells immediately after he posts it. Friends commission him to paint bottles of their favorite beer, or potato chips, or sriracha. Who are the people buying this, and why? Who are the curators who give him shows, and how doe he live in their imaginations?
Margret Grebowicz is the author of Whale Song (Bloomsbury 2017), The National Park to Come (Stanford 2015), and Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford 2013). She is currently working on her next book, Mountains and Desire. Find her at [email protected].
