Itinerant Dreamer by Doren Robbins
Introspection Series 1 - C4
Visitors
All the Characters in My Life are Dreaming
Rocking Horse Archetype
Rexroth Now
Elections in My Time
Black Nephew Archetype
Although each of Doren Robbins’ previous books deserves close scrutiny to those who value literature and political awareness, Itinerant Dreamer is his most condensed and accessible work to date. This is obviously in part due to the infusion of his collected and invented imagery.
For me, the most stunning aspects of Robbins’ artworks are the color schemes and carefully composed surfaces, often with a layered, 3D effect. His drawings have developed over many years of trial and error, finding a seemingly bottomless well of clear self-expression. “Baby Hitler with Wet Nurse” is a favorite of mine among the drawings. As with many of Robbins’ works, it stands on the razor’s edge straddling tenderness and horror.
Robbins seems to interweave two diverse strands of 20th century approaches to art. I would crudely describe them as the exquisite estheticism of the Bauhaus and the smudgier esthetic of, for example, Andy Warhol’s purposely blurred and off-register lithographs. It’s as if Robbins’ dialectic with those styles has yielded a synthesis which is able to contain the dark and uncomfortable, the primordial and the unformed, all within the parameters of what is also strikingly beautiful. His intuition and sense of balance necessary to pull off this paradoxical feat is considerable. Robbins does it seemingly without effort, offering a joyful gift.
The intervention of his titles and text in the book is more than playful—it strategically grounds the images in complexity and gives them an added profundity. The titles, text, and images ricochet off each other. The effect becomes magnified as we read along and view.
Each section is a punch epiphany until we are knocked out. By the end, my brain and heart were made intensely aware of the broken yet ecstatic world which we inhabit with humble fragility. With the accumulation of his words and images, Robbins demonstrates a method by which we can live courageously. Few books offer this much.
Itinerant Dreamer by Doren Robbins
(Sandy Press)