August 30 - September 30, 2023
Telluride Arts HQ East
220 W Colorado Ave
Telluride, Colorado 81435
Open 12pm - 6pm Most Days
Rob Gonzo, (aka. Robert Wolverton, Jr) is an Outsider Artist from Memphis, Tennessee who has recently relocated to North Carolina while still keeping a base in Memphis. Over the past 20 years, he has supported himself working odd jobs that included chinking log cabins and restoring buildings on the Natchez Trace Parkway, beer truck deliveries to JukeJoints and country stores in the Mississippi delta, digging ginseng and yellow root in Mt. Pleasant, picking, and some film acting.
Having been drawn to art at the age of 6. He tried art school, but dropped out after a couple of weeks. His art career followed the path of typical Outsider Artists who give paintings away to interested fans, or sell them for $100 or less. Also typical was Rob’s zeal for creating art. He was turning out dozens of paintings every month.
That path changed when Rob’s style began to take on a more evolved look around 2016. A broader, more seasoned group of art collectors began paying attention to his art using two strong reference points...Jean-Michel Basquait and Pablo Picasso. Rob was suddenly shipping art to New York, London and Los Angeles appealing to, among others, young film producers and directors who recognized the uniqueness and greater value in his paintings.
His odd jobs dropped to the wayside as he began dedicating full time to his art, focusing more on quality and details rather than on quantity.
Rob’s art is considered to be a mix of styles including: contemporary, abstract, folk art, neo-expressionism, street art and graffiti. He uses material such as fabrics, cardboard, and other found objects to build up texture, dimension and create stories. During his picking days, he gathered a lot of ephemera dating back to the early 1900s that he also uses as small touches of collage.
He has graduated from his early folkart days where he would paint on almost anything that would stay still long enough. Now Rob prefers canvas, but still paints both large and small images on board. He likes to use bright vivid colors, sometimes straight from the tube.
Rob connected with one of his hometown heroes, nationally acclaimed artist George Hunt in 2018. The two completed a couple of “Shared Spaces” paintings working together. One of the shared paintings was for the 2022 Beale Street Music Festival poster. Hunt, like Rob, was heavily influenced by Picasso and Basquiat and he shared Rob’s regular use of interesting and unique collage materials.
Some of Rob's inspiration also comes from old-school folk artists like Howard Finster.
Rob Gonzo painted the original image for the 2021 & 2022 Telluride Blues & Brews posters, and has now debuted a third image for the 2023 festival.
