INTRO by ROBERT HORNING

      Welcome to my website.  In "The Latest" portfolio and in portfolios covering areas where I have been prolific, I'll be rotating work on the first of every month.  Look for a new portfolio on abstract work next.

     An education in zoology precedes my art studies, and the former continues to permeate the latter.  Animal themes are conspicuous by their abundance, but my dominant source of inspiration is, in the final analysis, the all-too-human animal.  I refer to this side of my output as "Body Portraiture", that is, psychological portraiture, which ignores traditional distinctions between physique and physignomy.  I would expect this to convey the concept of an acceptance of our biological physicality and our ineluctable continuity with the natural world, which I am well aware, is at odds with more long-standing, widely prevailing and deeply imprinted western cultural traditions.  As a naturalist/artist, I see it as my mission to extend, and when necessary, to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the separateness of our species from the rest of the natural world.

     As a Modern Artist, suspended between the historical antipodes of Academicism and Post Modernism, I also see it as supremely necessary to help restore to art the autonomy that historically once characterized the modernist enterprise, to include the taking back into our domain the artists' essential prerogative to define art in specifically aesthetic terms.