Robert Royhl is a painter who has been living and working in Bozeman, Montana, for the past thirty-four years. Born in NYC in 1949, he grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and has lived and traveled all over the West. Currently, he is working on a series of paintings called “Across the Wide Missouri.” This is his meditation on what we have wrought in the far west landscape and about the new realities we are creating in our trajectory through the 21st century.

Widely exhibited since the early 1970s, Robert has shown his work in numerous galleries and museums in California, Arizona, Japan and Montana. Most recently, he had two pieces in the Art Auction Show at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings. He is also creating books and his Catalog Raisonne was finished last year called “400.” He is now finishing “Kyoto, Journals 1996-2001,” which will be out in March 2021. In September, he will show his newest work at Aunt Dofe’s House of Memories in Willow Creek with his wife, artist Gesine Janzen.

“Although I have lived in Montana for the past thirty years, I grew up in Arizona in the west of cowboys and Indians. The desert was also inhabited by astronauts, pachucos, and scientists doing nuclear testing. Every Saturday at noon when I was a child, the air raid sirens would go off all over Tucson. People across the street from where we lived were building a fall-out shelter. Twilight Zone was the TV show that seemed to best capture the mood. I wandered the Sonoran outback with rock and roll radio as my soundtrack. The landscape of Southern Arizona is still my favorite in the world. Its fragile beauty heightened by all the modern technologies that are engulfing it. Growing up, I always had the sensation that I was living in a space colony on another planet. Biosphere 2, built outside of Tucson, is the most poignant expression of this. My constant artistic challenge is how to depict this “New Frontier” in both its glory and weirdness. How to paint what it feels like to be in this world? If I had to sum up what my goal as an artist is in a sentence it might be, the job of the artist is the reenchantment of the world.”

Visit Robert’s website: www.robertroyhl.com/ to order a book or view more of his paintings.