As a teenager, I worked as a janitor to help pay my way through private high school. I respected the honesty of the work, and it provided orderly spaces for my disorderly thoughts to move freely. A janitor knows a room differently than the guests at a party. He works after others have left, often alone—largely invisible, but present at the moment when a room might tilt back into possibility.

I make paintings of vernacular interiors by spending extended periods of time alone with them. These are spaces designed by function, where repetitive use has worn a groove into the minds of those who encounter them daily. They are anonymous, built to be ignored. In them I pause long enough to disrupt prescriptive use and welcome uncertainty. I’m drawn to the ambiguity of certain spatial alignments, and to light that asserts a physical reality of its own—weight, density, and temperature. These conditions compel me to decide what to include and what not to include. The finished painting is an active rearrangement of the space, its original parameters reduced to a small group of heightened visual relationships which were there from the beginning.

One common thread that runs through all of Robinson’s work is a complex psychology-a tension and depth of feeling that results from intense and perceptive observation. In his paintings feelings become graspable. Robinson’s subjects are evocative and dream like, but they also exist right in front of you.

- Artist Brett Baker