I first interviewed Robert in 2018. Here’s my follow-up interview on how his work was impacted by the pandemic and what he’s up to now.
Robert Bean’s responsibilities haven’t changed much recently.
As a visual storyteller focusing mainly on painting and drawing, he gets up at 6:30 am and works in his studio for six hours at least six days a week. He also teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and the Museum School of the Arkansas Arts Center. “I like to create narratives with my work,” Robert explained. “I often base it on figure or the individual or people, that sort of thing. I’ve been working on a lot of projects of my own. I’ve got several book projects that I’m working on where I’m creating illustrated short stories.”
And then there are his Art Thoughts for Friday, which are essays about being an artist and the issues that come with the discipline. He started his essays last summer as he started complex work that couldn’t be shared on social media until it was finished. “For me to be able to stay engaged with people, I had to find another way to do it, and I thought, ‘Why don’t I just start writing something?’” Robert said. “‘What is it that I do?’ That sort of thing. They really were short when I started them. They might be two paragraphs. And they were more of a prompt than they were an essay. I would deal with something like, well, I have a hard time letting go of work, or something like that. How about you guys, what do you do? And then people would respond and it was more of a dialogue. But then as it evolved, I started to see the form. And I started to say, these are real essays. Some of the stuff I want to write about are real essays. I think the one that really pushed me forward was I wrote one about alcohol. How prevalent it is in the arts and how maybe it’s not a great thing that every single art event is inundated with alcohol and almost all of them are and that was a heartfelt essay, it was the longest one I’d written at that point and that was what turned the corner for me. These are real essays I’m starting to write. These are real, in-depth thoughts, and at that point, I had enough people that were cheering me on and sending me messages saying, ‘I really love this. I’m looking forward to every Friday.’ And I thought, man I stumbled into something here. I need to keep doing this. Sometimes it feels good to get it off my chest, too. Get it out there.”
He’s now putting together a book of the essays that will be available this summer. “I was surprised by how popular it was, and so I’ve kept it going and I’ve started putting together a collection of those essays as well,” Robert said. “I’m hoping to have that out, depending on what’s going on in the world, sometime this summer. My original launch date had been April, but that has all been, well, topsy-turvy’s the best way to put it right now.”
As the chair of painting and drawing at the Arkansas Arts Center, he’s been heavily involved over the past year with helping move the center to a new location, set up new studios, and restart classes. “It was monumental, let’s just say that, to get everything moved over, and I had the easiest job, probably, in painting and drawing,” Robert shared. “I didn’t have to do ceramics with their entire kiln room and all of that stuff. But I have been incredibly busy with all of that.”
When the pandemic hit, Robert found his commute eliminated as classes moved online, but little else changed. “In a weird way, it hasn’t affected me nearly as much as some others,” Robert said. “Before I started teaching and being department chair at the Museum School, I was actually self-employed for a long time. I worked on my own, I had to get up every day and set my own schedule, I would get into the studio. I tried to keep hours the best that I could in the studio. I did graphic design from home, all that and even over the past year and a half or whatever, I get up about 6:30 in the morning and I get in the studio. I make a cup of coffee and I go in the studio and I work for about four or five hours, if I can. And I do that almost every day. Sometimes I take a Saturday or Sunday off but I usually will do one of the two in the studio as well. When all of this hit, and all of a sudden we were having to stay home and I’m having to work from home for the arts center and my class at UALR went online, all it did was mean okay, when it gets to after I have lunch, 12, 12:30, I’m just clocking in and working remotely. It didn’t change my flow in terms of what I was doing in the studio.”
The type of work he produces hasn’t changed much either. He still has space in his studio for larger works and space for smaller pieces, including where he teaches his online classes and writes. “I’ve never been an artist that’s influenced by these big things that happen,” Robert said. “I know a lot of artists are starting to make work that responds to the idea of the pandemic and it tends to be these really broad concepts that they’re responding to. I’ve always been a fan of how the single person reacts or a couple of people. That’s that storyteller aspect, right? I want to know the story of the one person who is living in isolation during all of this. And if I was to create something in response to it, that’s the story I’m going to tell. That’s the work I’m going to create. The pandemic would be more of the pause of the effect of the character rather than being the main focus of the story. The story is a person. Not the pandemic. That’s why I haven’t really changed what I’m doing in terms of that. I’m still doing figure drawing. I’m just doing it from videos online. I’m still making these illustrated stories that I’ve been working on. I’m still writing poems. And those poems, those stories, tend to be about people. And I’m trying to investigate people who are not like me.”
Robert has also noticed how the rest of the world has realized how much they need the arts. “All of a sudden, they’re starting to draw, play music,” Robert said. “I’ve seen the stuff that says, ‘You don’t support the arts? What are you doing right now? You’re reading books. You’re coloring. You’re doing all of these things.’ And I’m 100% behind that. We should be funding and supporting the arts, not letting them go or devaluing them.”
Creatives haven’t been stopped by the limitations of social distancing, either, like Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, which used Zoom, a business tool, to create a music video for their song, Phenom, by pivoting in a matter of weeks. “To me, that’s the power of the arts and the creative brain,” Robert shared. “‘Okay, we get hit with this setback, but what do we do instead?’ It doesn’t just grind to a halt. They just go, ‘Okay. I’m gonna roll up my sleeves and I’m gonna figure out a different way to do this.’ And they get in there and do it. And I think that would benefit everyone so much more if we would fund and teach that kind of thing to everybody.”
Robert would like to see art continue to thrive after the pandemic. “I’m hoping that people don’t lose that creative aspect that they found during all of this,” he said. “That when they’re back out to their normal lives, they’re still trying to make things and they understand the value of creative pursuits.”
Look for Robert’s book this summer. Buy his work. Sign up for an online class with Robert through the Arkansas Arts Center (just $20 for four weeks). Follow him on Facebook and Instagram. Season three of Sustaining Craft explores how those with creative businesses have been impacted by the world-wide pandemic hitting the United States.