Bob Lafond attended the Boston Museum School (1967-69) and has an undergraduate degree in Art History (summa cum laude) from Princeton University (1971), where he studied under painter Esteban Vicente. He worked at the Princeton University Art Museum for almost twenty years. For the last several years, he has painted both oils and pastels of country and city landscapes, concentrating on the Berkshires and Brooklyn.
Statement “I am an old-fashioned representational painter. I have a tendency to be expressive and allow some chance events to survive in the painting. But I am dedicated to painting the natural world around me.
Pablo Picasso once accused Pierre Bonnard of being indecisive and behind the times because of his sensibility to looking at nature as a guide instead of overpowering nature as he did. In an essay on Bonnard, the writer Julian Barnes summarized this confrontation by asking, “Is the artist the servant or the master of Nature?” I don’t paint like Bonnard, but I recognize from this quarrel initiated by Picasso that I prefer to be an artist who humbly perceives nature and wants to learn from nature instead of pretending that I am a co-creator equal to or greater than nature.
In my paintings, instead of painting generic places, I prefer specific places. There's too much reality already in existence to make up one's own and risk becoming 'clicheish'. Artists only have a limited amount of visual ideas and gestures to rely upon without looking at the world around them to teach them. The painter Lois Dodd said that she makes her paintings from what she sees and finds in the world. If she concludes that what she is looking at won't work in a painting, she moves to a different position or moves on to another place. That has always been my approach as well. There's plenty of room for being as abstract or realistic as you might want within the specificity of reality.”
