Portrait Of An Artist – Jo Robinson: Maven of fluid art

I just love being able to create pretty things. To do it by this beautiful lake while being part of the artist collective, showing my work and teaching, is more than I’d ever imagined. I feel very fortunate! – Jo Robinson

 

By TIM WILCOX
Special to the Alpine Mountaineer

An unscheduled power outage struck Lake Arrowhead Village on a recent weekday. Planning to conduct a demonstration of her craft in the Community Arts Center (CAC), set at lake’s edge looking west toward the yacht club, Jo Robinson was undeterred. She moved her table, paints, drip catch basin, cups and other items out into the bright mid-afternoon sunshine and proceeded.

Jo is a member of the Mountain Arts Network (MAN), which operates the CAC as a teaching facility and meeting venue for the nonprofit organization. She’s also an accomplished practitioner of fluid art. What’s that?

“Fluid art consists of making relatively thick paint liquid by mixing it with a medium until it’s pourable,” Jo explains. “Then you can dump, pour or pour through something and move the paint around in various ways. The paints react with one another due to their different properties and produce all kinds of fun effects. I use it primarily now to create landscapes, but sometimes it’s fun to just pour and see what happens.”

But back to Jo’s demonstration. . . Reaching for a large bottle of paint conditioner, she adds an eyeballed amount to various cups of soft-body acrylics, swirling and mixing as necessary to attain the right consistency. The artist notes that “you can use many types of acrylic paint, but I find the soft-body forms to be the easiest to mix and the most economical for the vibrancy of pigments.”

Next Jo carefully pours various colors into what she terms “flip cups,” which she places face down on a 10-by-10-inch canvas, allowing the viscous contents to spread slowly. She also pours paint through a simple sink strainer and then, with the larger cups in hand, pours directly onto the canvas. 

Unusual and eye-catching

The results are unusual and eye-catching, to say the least. A blue sky with clouds emerges followed by mountains. Expertly manipulating the paints, Jo creates a body of water and then with a wooden tongue depressor renders what resembles sturdy marsh grass. Cell-like elements, which result from differing paint densities, appear spontaneously in various points on the canvas, adding even more visual appeal.

The artist can tilt the canvas to create flows of paint or blow through a plastic straw to push surface elements in various directions. She uses her fingers and sometimes brushes to make additional refinements.

“You never know exactly what you’re going to get,” Jo says, “and that’s part of the fun of it. You pour and then wait to see what happens. Manipulating the paints is an essential part of the process, too.” It’s an artful symphony of spontaneous and intentional effects.

“The challenge is knowing when to stop and let it be,” Jo emphasizes. “At some point you just have to say to yourself, ‘OK, this is it.’ Then you put the piece aside to let it dry, which usually takes about a day.”

In this particular case, the nearly finished artwork on a relatively small canvas is a magnet for passersby. (Her larger canvases are 20 by 10 inches and 16 by 20 inches). Some of them cast a shy glance at the piece in process, while others actually pause to admire it. Sharing comments with some of them, Jo is adept not only at demonstrating her craft, but also explaining it. This makes her an especially effective teacher for students (children, teens and adults) in low-cost monthly classes that she teaches at the CAC May through September. She’s also one of four MAN members who volunteer to conduct year-round free art classes for special-needs adults at Mountain of Promise in Crestline.

“I’m honored to be one of the teachers in this program and very much enjoy coming up with new ways for them to explore art,” Jo says.

An Air Force brat

Asked to sketch her personal background, Jo begins by identifying herself as an “Air Force brat.” She was born on a base in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. When she was just 1 year old, her father (a chief master sergeant) was posted to France. After four years, the family returned stateside to a base in Georgia. Four years later, her father retired from the Air Force, and the family embarked on a cross-country adventure “to figure out where we wanted to settle next,” says Jo, who was 9 at the time. “My mom fell in love with Utah, and so we lived in Salt Lake City for several years, then moved to Spain for five years.”

Why Spain? Jo pauses to access her memory banks: “My dad ended up with a civil-service job at Ogden Air Force Base after we moved to Utah. He had an opportunity to go to Spain to train the country’s military how to maintain the F-4 Phantom jets the U.S. had sold to them.” Near the end of that time on Spanish turf, she graduated from Torrejón American High School north of Madrid.

Launching their next far-flung chapter, her parents relocated to California. Jo enrolled at Utah State University in Logan, focusing on art history, drawing and ceramics. Then she herself moved to the Golden State.

After enduring agricultural work in Modesto for a while, she migrated south to the Los Angeles area. “There I became interested in photography and ended up working in the production end of the field – first in the darkroom and later in digital editing,” she shares. That turned out to be her career for some four decades, during which she lived in Burbank and Hollywood. Previously, Jo had married a band member she’d met in Modesto and had a son, Ian, who’s now a successful video-game designer/coder based in Washington State.

The artist continues: “I took drawing and painting classes throughout those years, primarily interested in an impressionist style, and participated in shows in the area from time to time. Finally, I was able to join the Burbank Art Federation. Then, while working a Christmas show in Burbank, I came across an artist who was doing fluid art, and I was dumbstruck. I had to get my hands on that medium.” She did. Her enthusiastic verdict: “I’ve never had quite so much fun with my art!”

Thirteen years ago, Jo married for a second time. Dave McMahon was a military brat, too. For most of his adult life, he was a fueling technician at Ontario Airport and then at the Burbank facility. Sharing a love for the San Bernardino Mountains and Lake Arrowhead, the couple purchased a home here nine years ago, initially enjoying it on weekends and during vacations. Then, in 2020, they retired and settled in permanently.

Jo had dabbled in fluid art before that move, but her interest in and commitment to the craft really took off in retirement. “It’s become a great source of satisfaction for me,” she says. “I just love being able to create pretty things. To do it by this beautiful lake while being part of the artist collective, showing my work and teaching, is more than I’d ever imagined. I feel very fortunate!

She also admits that “fluid art can be quite messy.” Then, with a smile and laugh, she points to her fingers and says, “I’m even inspired by the colors that end up on my hands.”

Jo Robinson’s fluid art is on display and for sale at the Mountain Arts Gallery on the lower level of Lake Arrowhead Village. For more information and images, visit Instagram.com/jo.robinson.90