Artist Detail

• Tell-a-friend

RB Anderson

Visual Artist

About the artist:

Mr. Anderson’s artistic discipline reflects his love for the color and facture of paintings by Van Gogh, Seurat and other Neoimpressionist artists. In an extraordinary career spanning fifty years he has combined the influence of a life-long study of art to develop colorful watercolors that literally seem to jump from the canvas. These works display a dynamic play with light and shadow, emanating emotion in color. An artist of acclaim, having studied and exhibited in New Mexico, Colorado, California and Arizona, his paintings are in fine collections throughout the United States. --RB Anderson is originally from Albuquerque New Mexico, a fourth generation artist who at the age of six created an oil painting of a Church in Taos which was accepted into his first adult art competition at the State Fair. RB went on to study art from noted artists Frank McCulloch and John Jellico. After graduation from Colorado Institute of Art RB, his wife Helen and 3 friends moved to San Francisco where his career began to bloom. He opened an art studio off 7th St. and Market in the heart of San Francisco, and created art for Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, Wane Shorter, Herb Green, John Paul Jones and Bill Grahm along with corporations and collectors. San Francisco was alive with creative juices. RB spent many hours tracing the foot-steps of artists, musicians, writers and poets that proceeded him. Many mornings you could find him in the North Beach Caffe Trieste, where you could sense the spirit of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Francis Ford Coppola enjoying the morning sun coming through the windows. You could feel the Beat Culture. Other times he would spend hours lost in the City Lights book store, the studios of friends or galleries that lined the streets of his walk from his studio up the hill to their apartment on Capitol Hill. Sometimes a ramble through the Haight would give the imagination a spark, visualizing just a few years before, The Monterey Pop Festival and muscians like John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas or the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. Yet other days it was easy to loose the day in one of the many art museums. Many times RB would attended various drawing, figure, painting or print making classes at San Francisco Art. Institute. Then came his most outstanding accomplishment Evan, his son was born and Wow life changed: RB became a single father and without going into details the next stage of life kicked in. He decided that the fast-pased life in San Francisco was not the environment his son should grow up in -- especially with one parent so, Wellie Nelsons song came playing “On the road again”. Phoenix seemed like a good clean environment where a young child could get a good start, and besides the area was growing and he had family there that offered to help. In Phoenix he met Terri and within months Terri and RB moved in together and the world was full of new possibilities. RBA opened a new studio and started producing art again and experimented with creative alternatives, in the 80’s they helped establish the 7th Street Art Community in Phoenix.