Origin

 

Bio

Rob DeLoach was not so much born in Atlanta as  it might be more accurate to say he emerged from a forest of paintbrushes and photo negatives, midwinter 1976, into a household brimming with ideas and improvisation. His father — a painter and architect who measured dreams in pencil lines — and his mother — a lens-wielding craftswoman who could conjure meaning from shadow and thread— raised Rob and his five sisters in a home where creativity wasn’t optional; it was oxygen.

He majored in Rhetoric and Studio Art at Hampden-Sydney College, becoming only the second soul in its tweedy history to do so. But before the inky brushes could dry, fate slapped a football helmet on his head and hurled him toward the NFL — a path tragically rerouted by an insistent gut and a surgical suite or three. Turns out, the body has plans the ego can’t veto.

From the bed of pain and recovery, paint and pen called louder than ever. What began as therapy bloomed into theology — a belief system rooted in woodgrain and waveforms, sacred symmetry and irreverent natural law.

Rob paints totems and trees, waveforms and winks from the universe. His works breathe with the rhythms of chaos and order, energy and stillness, sky and root. He paints with reverence, yes, but also with a wink — as if nature herself dared him to match her wild logic. He works frequently on reclaimed wood, listening to the stories held in every swirl of sap and knot, collaborating with trees that have fallen but are far from finished.

He splits time between the smoky mossed mountains of Asheville and the ocean-laced jungle of O‘ahu, with his marine biologist wife and their two children, River and Koa — a family baptized in salt, sap, chicken poo and starlight.

🌊 Artist Statement 

I paint because fate insists. And this compulsion to assemble color, line, and soul into something that breathes — it’s the one thing that made sense when nothing else did.. Somewhere between a medical chart and a lost football dream, I remembered that creation is not just salvation — it’s electric. My Art is what happens when I step out of time.

My work is a dance with nature’s fingerprints — wood grain, wave crest, spiral galaxy, feather pattern, totem symmetry, tree bark poetry. I’m interested in the architecture of chaos, in the fertility of failure, in the way color makes sound if you stare long enough.

My Totem paintings are reflections hidden in wood grain and secret creatures curled in symmetry. Each one grows organically, like a psychedelic forest of mirrored spirit-beasts. These creatures are prayers with claws — reflections of strength, struggle, and the cosmic crossbreeding of dreams and biology.

My dot paintings? They’re about context and consequence. You don’t get to choose the color of your dot, or choose the womb you burst from, or the century you land in.. You only get to respond to what surrounds you — a bit like life, no? The dots? They’re environmental allegory. Each color depends on its neighbors — just like you and I should.

Trees are my spirit’s favorite metaphor. They grow or die. They are vessels of breath, poems of patience. A tree can house a storm, feed a family, furnish a home, and still, silently, reach for the stars. And when they fall, I like to think their grain carries the echo of birdsong and storms. So when I paint on wood — there is a conversation between living and lived. I’m collaborating with something wiser than me.

And then there’s Bonsai — tiny titans of botanical paradox. Proof that size and strength never had to agree: control coexisting with chaos. Their branches shaped by time and intention, and given space, might let the birds fly through.

My work is about that space. That breath. That color you didn’t expect. That beast you didn’t see until the fifth glance. That part of yourself you always knew — was growing just beneath the bark.