Bob Landström’s art is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Using a combination of oil paint and crushed pigmented volcanic rock, he creates images that are scratched and drawn into the granulated surface. Mostly abstract, his work features symbols and iconography that echo ancient languages and religions.
Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Landström studied fine art by invitation at Carnegie-Mellon University and continued his fine art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.
His creative background laid the foundation to his later work, but understanding the principles of volcanic rock required much trial and error.
“I just started trying it,” Landström shared in an interview with Whitehot Magazine. “For a long time, I was taking rock in different degrees of granularity and just mixing it with paint, using oil paint as the binder for it. It would go on the canvas as wet, sticky gravel.”
Over the years Landström developed and refined numerous techniques for coloring the rock and using it as a painting medium. Nowadays, he admits, it’s hard for him to imagine painting with a liquid. As the main medium of his paintings is derived from the core of our planet, Landström’s body of work is also an attempt to tap into the core of the human experience.
“I’m optimistic because, for quite a long time, I had just occasional or minimal interest in my work,” Landström notes. “But over the past few years, that’s completely turned around. I want to step on the gas pedal. What I’m really hoping is that my audience grows and I can have conversations like we’re having today and make the most honest work I can create.”
