Bob Conge
Bob Conge’s artistic life emerged from necessity rather than choice. Growing up with an alcoholic father and living with undiagnosed dyslexia, he learned early to retreat into an interior world where imagination offered safety and clarity. Formal schooling was largely alienating. Subjects such as mathematics, grammar, and history felt inaccessible, while reading and spelling were a constant struggle. Art, however, was the one place where things made sense. Drawing and painting became his first language, a means of survival and self-definition. From an early age, his imagery gravitated toward nature, insects, volcanoes, outer space, Native American culture, and imagined worlds that felt more coherent than the one around him.
Conge’s path into higher education came late and unexpectedly. At twenty, an old friend who had reinvented himself through college introduced him to classical music and literature, opening the possibility that learning could exist outside punishment and failure. Accepted into art school on a probationary basis solely through his portfolio, Conge found himself, for the first time, in an environment where curiosity was rewarded. He fell in love with learning and remained immersed for six years, eventually earning an MFA in painting. That period marked a personal transformation. Leaving academia, he briefly opened his own gallery in a coastal resort town before returning to teaching when financial reality intervened. Teaching and painting ran in parallel for several years, until he ultimately chose to leave the university system to work independently and on his own terms.
Drawing remains the foundation of Conge’s practice. He describes it not as a technical exercise, but as a language that must be spoken daily to remain fluent. Much of his drawing takes place without tools, traced internally as his eyes follow contours, proportions, and rhythms in the world around him. For Conge, drawing is not about photographic likeness but about vitality. A finished drawing is one that carries the energy and inner essence of its subject, something no camera can replicate. He understands the act as a dialogue between line and surface, likening it to a dance whose rhythm determines when the work is complete.
His daily routine reflects a life organized around making. Ideas arrive in the half-hour after waking, captured quickly through shorthand sketches and notes. The rest of the day alternates between studio labor, reading, correspondence, shipping, family time, and late-night sculpting and painting sessions that often stretch into the early morning. This rhythm repeats seven days a week, sustained by a restless imagination and an aversion to repetition. Conge allows ideas to dictate materials, adopting what he calls a “use anything that works” philosophy. This openness has led him to experiment across media, driven in part by an intolerance for boredom and a lifelong instinct to tinker.
Portraiture has been central to Conge’s work for more than four decades. His approach begins long before any mark is made. Months of research into a subject’s life, reading biographies, letters, historical context, and studying images, allow him to build a deep familiarity with the individual. Only when that knowledge has fully settled does he begin drawing. For Conge, a portrait must move beyond resemblance to reveal how a person became who they are. It is an act of excavation, shaped by empathy, imagination, and sustained attention.
Conge resists the title of “artist,” believing it can only be conferred by others. Making images, he insists, was never a career decision but the only means he had to integrate everything he cared about into a single practice. Story is the driving force behind his work. His images are meant to confront rather than soothe, to deliver clarity with force rather than elegance. This urgency extends into his sculptural practice, where he addresses contemporary social and economic injustice. Works such as Bank America / come suckle on the tit of credit confront financial exploitation directly, using satire and provocation to expose systems that trap the most vulnerable in cycles of debt.
For Conge, creation is a spiritual ritual, a dialogue between subject, material, and self that unfolds through intuition and accumulated experience. He describes moments when the work feels less authored than channeled, as if drawing from the collective memory of art history itself. Finished works hold little attachment for him. Once released, they are offered like paper boats set adrift, meant to be found or forgotten. His concern remains singular and unwavering: to stay on the path, to continue making, and to give form to the stories that demand expression.
