CyberArt Combined

[robster2016]

Army of Dartness

Beneath a canopy where daylight survives only as rumor, a congress of poison dart frogs takes the forest floor, each jewel-bright body burning against the green dark like an ember that refuses to go out. Crimson, cobalt, tangerine, and a green lit as though from within scatter across a tangle of palm fronds, fallen timber, and the patient gold of woodland mushrooms. These small amphibians of the…

Army of Dartness

[robster2016]

Tea and Tentacles

The protagonist of this piece, if such a thing can be called a protagonist, is a shoggoth at his leisure. He has dressed for the occasion. A black silk topper sits upon the upper mass of him, a monocle is fixed to more than one of the more discerning eyes, and a pocket watch hangs by its chain from a tentacle that has just consulted the hour. It is teatime. The cup waits upon the cushion of the…

Tea and Tentacles

[robster2016]

Wisdom

The owl looks back. That, in the end, is the whole of the painting. Another of a month-long trifecta that is coming to fruition this week. I had set out to render the bird in something other than the customary brown and umber. Wisdom, in the older mythologies, keeps strange company. She walks the night with Athena, peers from the shoulder of Minerva, hunts among the Egyptian dead. None of that…

Wisdom

[robster2016]

Midnight in the Sacred Grove

Some symbols arrive on the canvas without much negotiation. The triquetra is one of them. I had the knot in mind. The trees had other ideas, and we met somewhere in the middle. A Trinity Knot Grown from the Wood The composition is straightforward. Three trees, three boughs, one sign. Their branches arch and cross to form the threefold mark that pre-Christian Europe carved on its standing…

Midnight in the Sacred Grove

[robster2016]

Reflections

The moon gives light borrowed from the sun. Stand long enough beside still water on a clear night and one discovers the water gives that light back again, twice removed from its source and stranger for the journey. Reflection began with that small astonishment. The work is acrylic on canvas, eighteen by twenty inches, executed in traditional brush and airbrush together. The lunar disc was laid…

Reflections

[robster2016]

This post further explores my interest in philosophy and metaphysics. If here for the art, please ignore, thank you. :)

Wheeler's Knife

[robster2016]

The Human Stain

This painting is about the end, when humanity’s hubris angers the universe to the point where it’s not worth saving anymore. I used a liminal hallway, half symbolic of the damage we’ve done as a species to our home on this island among the blackness of space/time, the other half symbolizing an escape of the innocent. The angel, well, she’s taking a last look around before heading out for the…

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[robster2016]

Succession

I painted this at the Ashville Viking Festival in Ashville, Ohio this past weekend. It’s a charming festival held in late April every year. Entrance is by donating canned goods. It’s all for a good cause. In Succession, the castle does not merely crumble, it yields. Its walls, once raised by human hands against sea, storm, hunger, and invasion, have become a pedestal for something older than…

Succession

[robster2016]

Selkie's Secret

Sometimes I paint things and forget to post them. This was completed in 2025. A woman of the sea stands between revelation and concealment, her presence half offered, half withdrawn, as though the tide itself had shaped her from memory and foam. In Selkie’s Secret, I wanted the old northern folklore to remain intact, the sense that the sea keeps its own counsel, and that what emerges from it is…

Selkie's Secret

[robster2016]

The Dance

Before the churches rose, before the calendars named the months, women walked the turning earth on bare feet and felt a pulse beneath them older than any catechism. This painting belongs to that elder country. A woman dances at midnight among violet blossoms and dark loam, the ankles bound in thin chains. The damp ground below quickens with wildflowers and ribbons of teal brushwork, each stroke…

The Dance

[robster2016]

The Prison and the Map

On Coordinates, Cosmic Uncertainty, and Why Time Travel Is Probably Not Happening Eye of Heaven It Started at Two in the Morning I could not sleep. This is, admittedly, not the most auspicious opening line for what I intend to be a serious piece of writing, but there it is. It was somewhere past two in the morning, and rather than lie there cataloguing the ordinary anxieties that tend to…

The Prison and the Map

[robster2016]

The Unsalvageable

The Unsalvageable — Acrylic on Canvas 18″x24″ There are charts for every sea. Degree by degree, the compass rose promises orientation, mastery, the civilised fiction that one always knows where one stands. The ring of numbers encircling this composition — 165, 180, 195, 210, 225 — speaks that language of navigation with calm authority, even as everything within it descends into beautiful…

The Unsalvageable

[robster2016]

Pop Psychopomp

Note: I finished this in 2025 – I just never posted it to the website. Every painter who has ever picked up a brush in the last sixty years owes Warhol a debt and an argument. The debt is obvious — he proved that bold, flat colour against a strong ground could carry genuine spiritual weight. The argument is this: thirty-two Marilyns in a grid is magnificent once. It becomes wallpaper by the…

Pop Psychopomp

[robster2016]

The Sublime Beyond Terror

What the Vastness Actually Reveals A word of departure: those who visit this site regularly will know it primarily as a home for paintings. That remains true, and it will continue to be so. Some months ago, however, I closed my Substack and made the decision to consolidate all of my work (visual, musical, philosophical) under one roof here at robmedley.com. The hope is for the visitor to gain…

The Sublime Beyond Terror

[robster2016]

Whisper in the Hollow

There is something ancient about a hollow tree — the way it holds its secrets, the lives it shelters without announcing them. Whisper in the Hollow began with the oak, that weathered sentinel standing between seasons. The owl came next, patient in its hollow. Then the raccoon, low in the bracken, doing what raccoons do. The stag in the distance was always there; one simply had to look. Acrylic…

Whisper in the Hollow

[robster2016]

The Priestess

She stands where the mortal world thins and something older breathes through. Wreathed in mist beneath a blood moon, her raised hand channels what the forest remembers and civilization has long since forgotten. The aurora turns above her like a living wheel. The Priestess The Priestess explores the archetype of the feminine as sovereign conduit — not suppliant, not symbol, but the very vessel…

The Priestess

[robster2016]

Rot and Rebirth

Some fires destroy.Some fires reveal what survives them. In this piece I imagined a witness to the end of the world. Cities fall, the sky burns, and the ground fills with the remains of what once lived. Yet even in the middle of ruin, something ancient continues its quiet work. Branches bloom. The figure carries death in her bones and life in her hair. Fire becomes a kind of crown, and the…

Rot and Rebirth