Clem Robins studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York from 1973-79. His teachers included Joseph Hirsch, Robert Phillipp, Ted Seth Jacobs and Robert Beverly Hale. In the late 1990s he fell in with a cadre of classically trained painters, whose influence compelled him to rethink notions about painting that he’d held as gospel for decades. Better to face a dressing down like this in your forties than in your sixties, I guess. It would have been better still to have had it happen when he was a kid, but one can’t change the past.
Robins paints mostly landscapes and cityscapes, but please poke through the gallery on this site. You'll find a little bit of everything.
His paintings and drawings are in numerous private collections, and in the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
From 1998 through 2007 he taught figure drawing and human anatomy at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
His book The Art of Figure Drawing was published in 2003 by North Light Books, and has since been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese.
He's provided TV courtroom sketches for numerous markets, and for CNN.
Since 1977 he's provided lettering for every major comic book publisher. When this work went digital in the early years of the 21st century, Robins began a quest to produce computer lettering which would be indistinguishable from the handmade variety. It took him six years to figure out a workable means of accomplishing this. Since then, more than one critic has complimented Robins' clients for continuing to buy what they think is hand lettering. (You can read a four-part essay on the nature of the problem, and his method of solving it, in the ESSAY section of this web page.)
He lives in Cincinnati with his lovely, and extraordinarily patient, wife Lisa.