Rob was born in rural Virginia, but traveled broadly in the world. His influences were diverse. Early studies were at the Virginia Commonwealth University and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC. He also studied privately with the Washington Color School painter Leon Berkowitz, as well as with master ink brush painter Tham Sie Winn (Malaysia). He settled with his wife Katie and their children along the Hudson River in Esopus, NY, working out of a studio converted from an old church. Rob died of complications from cancer and covid in 2020.
His work combines surreal forms, skilled configuration of elements, and striking colour schemes. He has an uncanny knack for morphing forms and investing them with layered meanings, all without losing their visual identity. This makes his work accessible, richly complex and unpretentious: a rare combination.
The glory of his art, however, is not in its visual pleasure alone, but also in the meaning it conveys. The quote below is from a press release by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) during an exhibition of Rob’s work in the Fall of 2003.
Hite’s work explores the realm where nature and humankind intersect. A sense of the delicate and transitory relationship between man and environment are aroused by bird silhouettes that punctuate smoke from a chimney fire and chairs that litter a yard recently vacated. His paintings and sculptures come filtered through a lens directed to the natural world, layered with gestures of human and ecological struggle and with a sensitivity for what is poetic and beautiful within this interaction…. Rob’s practice of using discarded objects both upholds and extends traditions of recycling and reuse that have by necessity been creative living strategies practiced by the majority of the world’s peoples.
These are good interpretations and characterize much of the commentary about his work. Yet left on its own, this discourse of sustainability — of human privation, ecological struggle, and the global maldistribution of power and resources — misses the mark. Not because it is unimportant or lacks its own insights. Rather it draws too tight a focus on human beings and ‘our’ environment. Such commentary is silent about the animals and nature in Rob’s work.
Rob’s early work routinely depicts people and animals through painting. The people are physically invisible in our field of view but are nonetheless manifest through their artifacts, albeit juxtaposed in a landscape of animals and nature. We might describe this theme as “dwelling in mixed communities.” For Rob, dwelling is about people and animals living in natural and cultural landscapes. His art prefigures a vibrant vision of a mixed community of beings who are human and non-human, wild and domesticated.
Much of his latter work manifests this same vision, if in a different way. Take for example the sculpture and photography project, “Imagined Histories” from 2011, first shown at Nassau County Museum of Art. Here Rob creates sculptures of dwellings with a mythical sensibility, installs them in the landscape of the Hudson River Valley, and photographs the result. Displays of both the sculptures and photos are then shown in galleries around the Northeast. It is a beautiful body of art, some of which is shown here.
Rob scales us down to size, visually, aesthetically and morally. He depicts people as the animals we are, dwelling with other creatures in shared landscapes. He envisions a more humble humanity where we might live in a truly mixed community of people, animals and nature.
Bill Lynn
5 January 2024