“Decoration has always had its own agenda, the sincere and unabashed offering of pleasure and solace.”

-Robert Kushner

Robert Kushner is an American contemporary painter who was born in Pasadena, California in 1949 and lives and works in New York City today. He is most known for his involvement in the Pattern and Decoration art movement in the 1970s.  In addition to painting he creates large scale public installations in a variety of mediums.

Kushner’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, and Japan and Italy. He was the subject of solo exhibitions at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

We created a still life inspired by Kushner. Art in Action students started with a scraping technique to layer paint, black oil pastels to sketch in their tulips, acrylic paint and detail brushes to paint in the tulips and finished by layering more chalk pastels over scraped background. Even though the groundhog predicted 6 more weeks of winter, Art in Action students enthusiastically brightened up all our classroom with the promise of spring….