Robin Jack Sarner is a Los Angeles–based abstract painter working in large-scale mixed-media on canvas. Her practice explores how emotional experience and memory are translated through surface, structure, and gesture. Through layered accumulation, revision, and material intervention, she creates immersive fields that balance restraint with disruption, allowing tension to remain visible within the work.

Sarner holds a B.S. in Art Education from Florida Southern College, where she received the Albert Key Award for highest honors. After working in business management and raising a family, she returned to her studio practice with renewed focus and rigor. Her work has been commissioned, collected privately, featured in publications, and was the subject of a filmed studio visit with art critic Peter Frank. She is an active member of The Artist Studio collective at the Palos Verdes Art Center and designs and delivers abstract art curricula for K–12 students in local school districts, reaching over 6,000 students annually.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am an abstract painter working in large scale on canvas, exploring how emotional experience and internal tension can be translated through material process. I approach painting as a site of negotiation — a space where structure and disruption, control and surrender, coexist.

My work develops through cycles of layering, compression, interruption, and revision. I build surfaces through accumulated paint and integrated materials, establishing visual tension within the canvas before deliberately destabilizing it through cutting, reworking, and gestural intervention. These shifts are not illustrative; they are physical investigations into how containment and release operate within both the body and the act of painting itself.

Rather than depicting emotion directly, I am interested in how abstraction can hold it — how surface, density, rhythm, and rupture can register states that resist literal representation. The paintings evolve through sustained engagement, allowing earlier decisions to be obscured, challenged, or revealed over time.

I see the studio as a space of active dialogue between intention and response. Each work becomes a record of that exchange — a layered accumulation of restraint, interruption, and adjustment that reflects the ongoing effort to move alongside experience without being overtaken by it.