Robert Spellman

This web site appears in my sixtieth summer. As a painter and teacher I am still engaged daily in the activity and pleasure of discovery, yet I'm aware of a retrospective dimension to the work shown here, somewhat like cleaning out an attic. Actually, most of the work on this site is from the past five years, except for some of the illustrations. In any case, assembling these images has had me rummaging through a lot of things.

I decided to study art while in high school in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. My art teacher, Joseph Deignan, encouraged me to apply to art school in Boston. I realized only much later how much Mr. Deignan altered the direction of my life. (Some of our most important teachers can be quite unassuming, it seems.) In this case, he prepared me to apply to Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, which was very competitive; you had to have your ducks in a row.

Mass Art was a good experience. I enjoyed being in a school that was entirely devoted to the study of art. I wasn't exactly a crackerjack student and I probably missed a lot of important information. I did meet some very influential teachers. One was Arthur Hoener, who had studied with Hans Hoffman and Josef Albers. (Along with Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and others, he had also been in on some of the early experiments with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs; this was way before hippiedom.) Arthur Hoener was the first person to tell me about meditation. I still own the same copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps that he recommended. I didn't know at the time that the practice of mindfulness meditation would become a central mode of inquiry for me. Among the many things that he taught, one was the practice of drawing Roman capital letters freehand. I remember his saying to me, "This is your kind of practice!" It wasn't until many years later that I began to understand that he was imparting a lifelong practice of looking, seeing, shaping, and honing. Some of my other teachers were Robert Moore and Jeremy Foss in painting – both of whom embodied art as its own form of wisdom; and a brilliant design teacher named Lew Fifield. I was also permanently altered by John Thorntons's Philosophy of Art class.

After graduating in 1972, I continued to live in Boston where I became one of the denizens of the old warehouse district around South Station in its last days before the Federal Reserve Bank and other urban renewals happened. It was during this time that I met my future wife, Joan Anderson, who is an artist herself and a very influential friend and guide. During these same years I resumed the study of music, a second love since elementary school.

In the late 1970s I came into contact with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, an unconventional and deeply penetrating teacher and artist who had fled the Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet. Under his guidance I became involved in the study and practice of Buddhist meditation. Joan and I left Boston in 1985 to take jobs as caretakers at a rural retreat center in southern Colorado called Dorje Khyung Dzong. This was a job we took sight unseen; I guess we were keen on getting out of Boston. The shift from urban east coast to rural – very rural – Colorado was extreme. And welcome. The Huerfano valley, in one of the poorest and most ruggedly beautiful counties in the state, turned out to be a very colorful neighborhood of artists, musicians, Hispanic ranchers, past and present hippies, and people who took quite seriously the sixties-era notion of dropping out . We stayed there for six years.

In 1991 we moved to Boulder, Colorado, to take administrative jobs in the Buddhist organization founded by Chögyam Trungpa; and later to begin teaching at The Naropa Institute, now Naropa University. I was Chair of the visual arts department from 1996 until 2003. I continue to teach there as an associate professor in both the visual arts and religious studies departments.

In 1996 Joan and I purchased land in southern Colorado in the Huerfano valley not far from the retreat center. We call this land "Mountain Water", and our vision is to provide a place for artists to practice sitting meditation and visual and verbal arts. The cumulative experience of living at Dorje Khung Dzong, where it was easy to practice both painting and meditation, and years of teaching at Naropa and privately has produced a trove of experiential knowledge about artistic practice. Mountain Water is where we will present this.