Robert Solotaire (1930-2008)

 

One of Maine’s finest artists, Robert Solotaire was born in Manhattan and spent his youth in one of the busiest urban settings imaginable, Times Square, where his father’s business was located.  Perhaps this helps to explain his later aesthetic involvement with the urban landscape, an interest that he pursued throughout his life, in cities like New York City, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Weirton, West Virginia. 

 

The intricate geometry of industrial installation, either by itself as an exercise in linear perspective, such as 138^th Street Bridge V; or industrial commonplaces set within a broader landscape setting such as York Street, were particularly alluring design challenges for the artist.  In the cases of the two paintings offered here,

138^th Street

Bridge V is a smaller version of a painting that was featured in a recent Portland Museum of Art Biennial. 

York Street

is a view of the on-ramp to the new Casco Bay Bridge in Portland, Maine, bisecting the urban landscape along the Fore River. 

 

One of Bob Solotaire’s major influences was the painter Stephen Etnier (1903-1984).  Solotaire credited him as the person who persuaded him to work outdoors directly from nature, and who “made me aware that there is a marvelous equation between paint and reality.”[1] 

 

Robert Solotaire’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, and in homes across the country.  Bob’s artful presence will be missed in his final home of Portland, where the streets were often his studio.