BiographyRobert McCauley was born and raised in Mt. Vernon, Washington. He graduated from Western Washington University in 1969, and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree from Washington State University in 1972. Throughout his career, McCauley has earned many prestigious awards including a Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and the Illinois Arts Council in 1999. McCauley also enjoyed a long and distinguished career as professor and Chairman of the Art Department at Rockford College in Illinois. Robert McCauley has created a mode of realism that is haunting and full of ambiguity. His distinctive animals manage to seem literal and symbolic at the same time, the viewer is suspended between these realms.Artist StatementIn Bear I Trust:Sometimes I feel as if I'm a class photographer at an elementary school, trying to get a host of subjects to be still while I fit them all in the viewfinder.As a painter, the task is equally difficult to arrange my images within the rectangle, trying to avoid an obvious composition, but rather, to compose in the manner in which nature composes. Which is to say no composition. It simply is.As a human exercising what little political power I might have, I struggle to campaign for nature and to remind all humans of our responsibilities as stewards of this planet. Art being transcendent, the images must rise above the banal, the vulgar, and the horrific. Graphic depiction of the plight of wildlife is an experience with which we are all too familiar. We turn away when news reports of abused animals flash on the screen. Instead, I choose to present a moment that does not immediately conjure a doomed future, but rather a moment when nature is in limbo, with a future still to be determined. It's a somewhat playful and ethereal moment, ironically rooted in the physical, malleable act of painting. Without that joyful element chock full o' oil paint and brush invention, I'd have to find a different form for my voice. To paint every day is pure optimism. As Marshall Mcluhan's mantra tells us, "the medium is the message".I am a fictionalized history revisionist. I gather together my animals and compress them into the rectangle as if they're all on the Raft of the Medusa, adrift, with one common concern: survival. As would happen on any lifeboat, the inhabitants are a mixed lot indeed. Animals from different climate zones are found side by side. Not so fictitious now that global warming is blurring the distinct zones. Predator and prey ignore previous tensions and stare out at the viewer, as if to ask, "Well?" And a storm brews on the horizon. Read the signs. We are down at eye level with the animals because there is no hierarchy. Snails and polar bears. We're all in this together. Read the signs.In many of the paintings, I have used an overlay of the painted word. I've painted them not solid, but as outlines as if a narrator's voice has been dubbed over the image. Wordsmithing and painting are of equal delight. If words are painted in paint, are they words or paintings? I trust the word "bear" as I trust the image of "bear". This is my voice.CollectionsAlberta Trunk and Gas Line Company, Alberta, CanadaAmoco, Denver, COAnoka-Ramsey State Junior CollegeArkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, ARAtlantic Richfield Company, Los Angeles, CAAugustana College, Rock Island, ILBaird and Warner, Chicago, ILBorg-Werner, Chicago, ILContinental Bank of Chicago, ILEaster Illinois University, Charleston, ILHerman Miller, Inc. Zeeland, MIIllinois State Museum, Springfield, ILJoseph Behr and Sons, Rockford, ILKemper Group, Long Grove, ILMicrosoft, Seattle, WAMilliken University, Decatur, ILNorthern Illinois University, Decalb, ILPhillip Morris, New York, NYRockford Art Museum, Rockford, ILRockford College, Rockford, ILSaks Fifth Avenue, NYC, Portland, Denver, Troy(MI), MinneapolisSecurity Pacific National Bank, Los Angeles and Sanger, CAWabash College, Crawfordsville, INWestern Washington University, Bellingham, WAWalker Richer Quinn, Seattle, WA