| Bob Ekelund, a Galveston, Texas native
and Eminent Scholar at Auburn University, has had a lifelong interest in
art and has painted for most of his life. Early interests also included
classical piano and study with Silvio Scionti of North Texas State University’s
School of Music. He received degrees in economics from St. Mary’s
University (San Antonio) in the early 1960s and a Ph.D. in that subject from
Louisiana State University in 1967, but his studies always contained an art
and an art history component. In the past two decades that interest
intensified with the study of watercolor, printmaking techniques and work
as an oil painter. Over the past five years, Ekelund’s work has been
shown regionally and in regular juried shows in the Auburn area where, in
2001 and 2002, he had solo exhibitions of oils and watercolors. He
has also designed book jackets for the University of Chicago Press and Edward
Elgar Publishing in London. His work is in private collections throughout
the United States, in Taiwan and in the Middle East.
“My work combines a personal esthetic with a deep and abiding
respect for artists of the past, most particularly the great French still
life painters such as Fantin-Latour, Redon and (especially) Cezanne, along
with American modernist landscape painters. Art, in my view, is a connection
to an ever-elusive nature. It is a representation of a physical thing
at some never-to-be-repeated moment in time, which is of course also an
abstraction. As Proust suggested, we search in things for reflections
of our own thoughts or what we have projected on them. Landscape painting,
which I am currently developing primarily with oils from the Taos area of
New Mexico, is simply another example of Proust’s idea. In effect,
objects in still life or landscape are reborn in particular ways for each
individual providing a unique kind of “permanence” for the objects, for the
painter, and for the viewer.”
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