Artist's Bio

Rob McAlpine was born in 1957 in Belleville, Ontario. He showed an early interest in art, filling his family's blank letter-writing tablets with pen and pencil sketches.

After high school, he enrolled in technical drawing at Belleville's Loyalist College but found the program too constraining and dropped out. A few years later, he moved to Kingston, Ontario, where he earned a diploma in Fine Art at St. Lawrence College and a BA at Queen's University. In art school, he struggled with painting until he discovered the medium of oils. The slow drying time of oils suited his creative style by allowing him to work and rework his subjects. Over the years he has developed a variety of subtle brush techniques and bold palettes.

Rob's preferred subjects to date have been landscapes, wilderness and rural, and the human face and figure. His landscapes have been exhibited in galleries in Belleville and Kingston, including Taylor Studios and Gallery Raymond.

As a gay man, Rob has always been drawn to the male face and figure and these subjects are the focus of this website. Some of these paintings depict live models, while others are recreations of images from men's magazines. Rob is unapologetic about painting magazine images, for he knows that the erotic relationships of many gay men exist entirely in the world of fantasy. He strives to embody in this series of paintings the impudence, vulnerability and longing of the watcher and the watched.

Artist's Statement

I never approach painting as a tactical process or with a particular style in mind, and I have never painted for the marketplace. When I paint landscapes, the experience is mystical and analytical. When I paint portraits or figures, it's a romance.

I am a "Gay Pride" artist, and this can be most clearly seen in my history of figurative paintings. All the paintings available on this site (currently nine) are male portrait and figurative studies. It's interesting that it never feels like a "study" when I do the portraits, but it's always a study when I paint the figure.

At age 24, I couldn't be out. I used my first oil portrait, of Robert Redford, to explore and honour my attraction to men. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could paint. Three of the images on this site (Pool Player, Face at the Window, and Solitude) are based on images in GQ magazine in the early 1980s. I used these images to explore my attraction to guys and my status as an outsider.

I'm working now on a series of male nudes. Some of these images are adapted from gay porn magazines and Playgirl because fantasy is an important aspect of my identity. These are psychological studies of what it means to be gay and to experience love as an emotional imagining.