--- type: page title: Artist Bio handle: about url: https://51a7c6-62.myshopify.com/pages/about published_at: '2026-03-19T09:02:39.000Z' --- About Robert Lawrence — The Artist Behind Melanin Art ===================================================== _Oil painter. Watercolorist. The Afrohemian spirit behind every canvas._ Meet Robert ----------- My name is Robert Lawrence, and the people I paint are the people who raised me. Growing up in Atlanta in the late eighties meant a house full of Black women who ran everything, with jazz always on in the kitchen. Nina, Coltrane, Miles. Somebody was always telling somebody else to pick up a book, and for most of my childhood that somebody was me. The boy with the book became the teenager with a brush, and neither one of them ever sat back down. The training is something I take seriously. At [Clark Atlanta University](https://www.cau.edu/), one of the HBCUs that kept Black American art alive inside the academy when the rest of the art world wasn't paying attention, I spent real time with the painters I had already fallen in love with as a kid. Jacob Lawrence. Aaron Douglas. Elizabeth Catlett. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Their originals live at the [Smithsonian](https://www.si.edu/museums/african-american-museum), the [Met](https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2003/african-american-artists), and [MoMA](https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/black-arts-movement), not because they were tokens of a moment but because they were the record of it. They painted us into the story of American art one canvas at a time, and those canvases are still doing their work. What I'm making does not claim their company. It claims their lineage. My hope is to be one more painter carrying forward what they started: Black life on canvas, made with care, made to last, made to hang in our own homes first. Twenty years in, over a hundred originals deep. Texas is home now, but Atlanta is where the work still comes from, and faith and family are why the easel never stays empty for long. The Craft Behind the Canvas --------------------------- **Oil & watercolor originals.** Every piece in this shop begins as a hand-painted original, made in my studio with jazz on and the door closed. [Miles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Davis), [Coltrane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coltrane), [Nina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Simone). Oil on canvas is what I reach for when a piece needs weight, the kind of depth that lets light sit on skin the way light sits on a grandmother's cheek at dusk. Watercolor is what I reach for when a piece needs to breathe, a child mid-thought, a dress in motion, a mood rather than a moment. Once an original is finished, it is reproduced as a museum-grade giclée print on acid-free archival canvas, using pigment inks rated to hold their color for a hundred years or more. That is the same process galleries use to preserve the work of their own artists, and it is the reason the painting you hang in your living room this year will still look like itself in your daughter's living room forty years from now. Painting and jazz come from the same place for me. Feeling first, technique second. The technique only earns its keep because it lets the feeling survive the brushstroke. The Piece Closest to My Heart: Black Boy Joy -------------------------------------------- The piece closest to me is _Black Boy Joy_. A Black boy with a book. Quiet. Focused. Lost in a world that's opening up to him. He is every cousin, every nephew, and every version of me at nine years old on the kitchen floor, reading while the grown folks argued about Reagan over greens. Black boys get painted as a lot of things in this country, but rarely do they get painted like this: at rest, at peace, already becoming. If one piece on this site tells you what I am trying to do with all of it, it is that one. Why I Create: Art for Every Black Home -------------------------------------- I could sell originals for thousands. Only a few people would ever own them. **That defeats the purpose.** I started Melanin Art so every Black home can have African American canvas art that represents who we are. Museum-grade prints of my original oil and watercolor paintings — affordable enough for a young woman or man in their first apartment, or a family making their living room feel like home. Galleries keep art behind a price tag most people can't reach. **My gallery is every room that hangs my work.** Not behind velvet ropes — on your walls. I want people to feel _seen_. A Black woman walks past her living room wall and feels celebrated. Not as an afterthought — as the centerpiece. A child grows up with Black culture art that looks like them and their family and thinks that's just how it's supposed to be. Someone comes home after a long day and feels proud of who they are just by looking at their wall. That's the Afrohemian spirit. African roots meeting the freedom to express yourself on your own terms. Not fitting into someone else's idea of decor — filling your space with Afrocentric canvas art that reflects your soul, your heritage, your story. Trusted by Etsy --------------- Before this site existed, my work sold on Etsy as [Melanin Art Roots](https://melaninartroots.etsy.com/). Since 2024 that shop has crossed 400 orders, kept a perfect 5-star average, and earned Etsy Star Seller status, which the platform awards based on ship time, response time, and review quality. Nothing I can say about the work matters more than what the people who hung it on their walls had to say about it. Those reviews are public, and you should read them before you buy anything from me. I built [Melanin Art](https://melaninart.com/) as a dedicated home for my full collection, with the same museum-grade quality and the same personal attention, direct from the artist.