About

Robert Doxey (1934-2018)

Robert John Doxey was born in Ogden, Utah in July 1934, the youngest of three children of Clifford and Estelle Doxey, both school teachers. He was raised in the Mormon faith, but as a teenager Robert turned against a religion he found stifling. He attended the University of Utah, earning a business degree in 1956, and afterward served for two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force at bases in Texas and Alabama. 

Eager for more liberal frontiers, Robert moved to San Francisco in early 1958. He had visited the Bay Area on family trips as a youth and had completed an internship in San Francisco while in college, and he’d long been charmed by the city’s beauty and Mediterranean light. He was also drawn by the city’s reputation as a hotbed of new ideas and freedom of expression. Though Robert was quite conventional in many aspects of his life, his politics were leftist and he found common cause in his off-work hours with the bohemian spirits he found in places like Sausalito and North Beach, ground zero for “Beatniks” in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. 

It should be noted that Robert’s older brother, Don Doxey, studied at the American Art School in New York in the mid-1950s and went on to become an accomplished professional artist and professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. However, it doesn’t appear that Don’s artistic endeavors sparked Robert, and it wasn’t until the early 1960s that Robert showed serious interest in art. This may have been due to geographic distance and stylistic preferences: while Don specialized in painting Western genre and still-life, Robert was inclined toward abstraction.

The arrival of Verne Stukan into Robert’s life in 1958 helped set the stage. Verne, like Robert, had recently arrived in San Francisco from points east with a curious mind, and they shared many of the same sensibilities, including a budding enthusiasm for modern art. The two married in 1959, and the keen appreciation for art they developed together, through countless visits to museums and galleries in San Francisco, New York and across Europe, was a key element that kept them intellectually stimulated for nearly 60 years. 

A turning point came in 1962, when Robert and Verne traveled for the first time to Europe. Their nine-month stay included visits to the major art museums they encountered across Western Europe. Changed by this enlightening, life-altering experience, and having learned so much about European countries, their wines, food and history, they returned to San Francisco and, in Robert’s case, an interest in creating art was awakened. 

Robert took his first steps as an artist soon afterward. Through artist friends, he became interested in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, whose members in the 1950s and ‘60s included Richard Diebenkorn and David Park. He enrolled in classes at the California School of Fine Arts (which later became the San Francisco Art Institute) and turned his attention to figurative drawing, concentrating largely on the human form. (The classes he attended at the School of Fine Arts turned out to be Robert’s only formal training as an artist.)

Over the next five decades, Robert experimented with various styles and materials. He worked in his home studio in the evenings and on weekends, often listening to jazz or opera, and was unaffiliated with any artist community. He drew inspiration largely from his frequent visits to museums and art galleries and his extensive collection of art books and periodicals. Most of his work was abstract, often geometric compositions featuring elements of constructivism and minimalism. Leading influences in his later years included Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Ellsworth Kelly.

Though Robert considered dedicating himself full-time to creating art, he felt obliged to earn a steady income to support his family. Through all his years in San Francisco, Robert worked in finance and banking, starting as a government bond trader at the Bank of America and later Crocker Bank before launching a series of private investment firms in the late 1970s. His business acumen provided a comfortable San Francisco lifestyle for Robert, Verne and their sons John and Nicholas. Robert was still going to his office daily at the time of this death in October 2018.  

A modest man, Robert maintained he didn’t want a public display of his art, feeling his work was not evolved enough. He left most of his works untitled and undated because he didn’t expect they would be seen by anyone other than his family and close friends.

Robert presents an intriguing outsider portrait: a successful investment banker who was at the same time a committed, self-taught artist working in his home studio after hours to further develop his work.