We Are Who We Are by Robert Garcia

Happy Tuesday, collectors! It's Sara this sleepy, scorching morning after a long fireworks and BBQ-filled weekend. Was it wonderful for you? Hope so! I'm excited to be back with a brand-new-to-20x200 artist.

Today's print, We Are Who We Are is the first painting we've editioned from Bay Area-based Robert Garcia. He's not this Robert Garcia and not that one, but the painter that Paddy Johnson over at Art Fag City featured in her masthead in March. Jen sent me the link to his work and we were both instantly smitten. I emailed Robert right away, we met briefly at our last Collectors Confab in San Francisco—how I wished we could have squeezed in a studio visit!—and here we are with his prints.

From the beginning, his work reminded us of early-on-20x200 artist Echo Eggebrecht.* Both share the ability to tell a multi-dimensional story on a two-dimensional plane, concocted from varying proportions of myth and reality, drawn from personal and fictional pasts. While enigmatic Echo's references are often obscure, it's Robert's hope that we'll all find something we can identify with in his works, no matter how disparate our backgrounds may be.

And, I think he's on to something. My childhood was a far cry from the one that's described in Robert's own bio, yet, when I saw We Are Who We Are, I began humming the nursery rhyme "one shoe off, and one shoe on, diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John..." while The King of the Wild Frontier theme song conjured the survival games my red-headed sister and I made up after reading Hatchet. We didn't have knives in our back-pockets, no, but we swung multi-purpose sticks that were at once swords to defend against unknown beasts, fire-starters when rubbed together, and skewers for collecting berries, leaves and other possibly-edible green things.

While it's easy to get lost on this trot back in time, the analytical, adult part of my brain keeps comparing what my life might have been like had I grown up some where or some how else: in an urban environment, with more or less stability, with fewer or more privileges, without a close sibling and parents. Would I be fundamentally different, would my path have been drastically altered? That I can't decisively answer this opens up a whole bunch of other implications and questions. But, I keep coming back to the same conclusion. The thing that is so both so enchanting and heart-breaking about Robert's work: it reminds us that at some earlier time in our lives, we all started out just about the same.

* Also, of Clare Grill, but that's for another newsletter. Yes, that's a hint—there's more to come from Garcia!