Rob Pudloski

BIO

Born in Milwaukee in 1967, I’ve lived most of my life in suburban Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison. After high school in Glenview IL, I studied painting and drawing at UW-Milwaukee. In the semester I intended to graduate, I returned home to Chicagoland and was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease and then during chemotherapy was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. This was also when I read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

My mother was an art teacher so I grew up going to art museums as a child. I remember being moved by the figurative work of the old masters but could not relate to the Christian themes, as I was raised a secular humanist. After a few decades of painting abstractly, as corny as it sounds, a trip to Italy rekindled my interest in figurative paintings.

STATEMENT

My paintings use personal iconography often in religious settings frequently drawing on northern Renaissance paintings. The universe invented in these paintings, however fanciful and implausible, speaks of truth the way an apocryphal story is false but illustrates a larger idea. I refer to them somewhat jokingly as secular religious paintings.

A white whale reappears as a perpetually present nemesis like the one that haunted Ahab. Naked figures inhabit desolate landscapes as red lights on towers warn landing aircraft of their hazard. Themes of renaissance paintings like Adam and Eve are contemporized and subverted. 

Besides Christian themes and Melville’s whale, some paintings refer to specific events in my life while others refer to Greek myth and even in one instance Neoplatonism. Of course, I could not help but comment on the presidency of Donald Trump.

In 2017, after moving into a large studio I painted a six foot by six foot canvas of Trump as part salamander showered with golden droplets. He is part salamander because his claim of “draining the swamp” is laughable, considering his businesses have operated by corruption and illegality. The swamp is Trump’s habitat. The golden shower refers to the possibly untrue incident reported in Micheal Steele’s dossier in which Russian agents filmed prostitutes urinating on Trump in a Moscow hotel as a form of Kompromat. This is combined with the Greek myth of the princess Danae, whose father King Acrisius placed in a bronze chamber in order to prevent her conceiving the son the Delphic oracle had prophesied would kill Acrisius. Zeus inseminates Danae with a golden shower bringing about the prophecy. This was a popular subject for many painters including Rembrandt and Titian. I just love the idea of Trump fulfilling some kind of prophecy by getting peed on.