Robert Larson was born 1968, in Carmel CA., and grew up in Santa Cruz, CA, a beach town nestled between redwood covered mountains and the waters of the Monterey Bay. Robert attended Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. After winning a painting scholarship Larson attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland California 1988-1989. There he studied painting with Raymond Saunders. Saunder's urban, mixed media paintings introduced Larson to the appropriation of image and object in the pop tradition of Rauschenberg's combine paintings and collages.
Living in Oakland yielded yet another important development for Larson and his art. After classes Robert began taking walks along the railroad tracks that ran behind his studio, exploring the industrial working class neighborhood that contrasted so sharply with his picturesque and privileged hometown of Santa Cruz. Here in the open air he felt a strange urgency to create unlike anything he had ever felt in the studio. He began collecting the scraps of rusted metal and distressed wood, which could be found in abundance along the tracks—overflow from the many junkyards that lined them. Bringing his tools with him in a knapsack he assembled his constructions in the field leaving them where he worked on them and often returning with just the right object to complete them. This deeply profound connection Larson made with the urban environment has remained an essential part of his art today. From 1995 to 2002, with Deutsch's coaching, Larson worked on his seven year project, "Evidence," an exploration of the urban landscape and the found object.
