Mr. Abele’s image of a humble cottage elevates the architecture it illustrates and brings to mind Edward Hopper’s personifications of similar coastal structures. The painterly quality of his surface makes the viewer want to learn more about his process, to see the way he utilizes his brush. Painted en plein air in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the image captures the specificity of this house with spare and quick strokes while evoking the atmosphere and the personality of this unique place.

Michael Rose Providence Art Club-


Robert Abele III's paintings of stovetops, kitchen interiors and ramshackle tenements are a tribute to the ordinary.With a handsomely disjointed perspective that would make Cezanne proud, Abele elevates kitchen clutter to high art. His ''Double Decker'' with chain link fence and azure sky is a familiar SouthCoast scene, altered by the invasion of a geometric abstraction''.
-Don Wilkinson Standard Times

Landscape engages me in an interior dialogue about its own significance and its relation to the environment and myself. These thoughts generate my final image. I use simple materials oil, brushes, canvas and an antique easel keeps me connected to the past. My composition starts with loose sketches done in vine charcoal. I feel my way through the landscape paying close attention to its shapes and textures. Simplicity and refinement happen only after a detailed draft is executed. I seek the simplification of form in the service of a sophisticated arrangement and design.

When I studied at the School of Visual Arts in the early 1990's, I was influenced by the artists of the Ashcan school and their documentary approach to image making. I chose to abandon the human presence and the subject of everyday life in order to represent the stillness of a scene. The observer’s eye completes the narrative on a human scale.

My paintings invite the viewer to experience the landscape in a personal and expressive way.