After graduating from art school, Robert was still sorting out priorities. He watched Hollywood films while recovering from cancer treatments and considered ways to connect with a wider audience as these films did. At the same time, he read about contemporary artists who pursued opposite paths.

The quotation at the top of this page is written by art critic Barbara Rose about American Pop artist Jasper Johns. Rose argues that art is enriched by the presence of “ideas not altogether agreeable to lazy minds and eyes grown accustomed to easy pleasures. We detect in John’s recent work a critique of hedonism … Johns belongs to that same tradition of the painter-philosopher as Leonardo, Poussin, Cezanne and Duchamp. He is making the same kind of critique that they made of the art of their time, i.e. that it was not fundamentally profound because it did not deal with philosophical and intellectual issues.”

At the bottom of the page is a self-portrait of Robert as a serious-minded, somewhat worried-looking young man.