My name is Rob Jacobs and I am an artist living in the Los Angeles area. Toward the end of 1999, I asked my father if he would like one of my angel art pieces to hang above his bed in his retirement home. He enthusiastically said, “yes,” and chose Angel 5. Then, without any pre-conscious thought, I said the following words:
“This angel will protect you.” I believe this was a spiritually-invoked statement because, about six months later, this angelic premonition came to pass, which literally saved my father’s life.
 

When I visited my father, who resided at a retirement hotel in Westwood, California, the ritual was to call him first, which I did every time, without exception. Heading home from my studio one day, the thought "see your father" flashed in my head. It was so strongly pronounced that I immediately turned around and headed for Westwood. The intense thought, “see your father,” turned into a voice. I had not called him, but "see your father" kept pounding in my head.

 

My heart was racing by the time I got to his room on the seventh floor. I banged on the door, but all I could hear was the TV blaring. I ran down to the office, got the staff to open the door, and found him lying on the floor unconscious. It took the paramedics only a few minutes to reach us, and they were able to revive him from insulin shock. Without the paramedics help, he would have been gone. I knew then, without a doubt, that the angel hanging over his bed had protected him by acting as a messenger to me. He had been plucked from his body's eternal rest. However, a year later he passed on peacefully during the night. He was ninety-three years old, and had lived in every decade of the Twentieth Century.

 

My artwork is an organic outgrowth of the remnants of my work as a photo retoucher to the advertising and entertainment industries. Having been a commercial artist for many years, my dream was to do my own images, which I call "fine art." This dream was ignited around 1990 by the great graphic designer, Larry Vigon. Larry had designed album covers for some of the most famous records, cassettes, CDs, in the history of the recording business. Having come over to my studio to view some work I was doing for him, he glanced down at one of the palettes that I create doing art work. He noticed a unique blending of colors and shapes emerging from the palette, left over from mixed colors, and the cleaning of brushes and airbrushes. This inspired me to start saving the palettes (9"x12" pieces of tracing paper), which was a mixture of paint, dyes, bleaches, glues, and masking fluid, all used in my process of photo retouching.These palettes became the materials that enabled me to begin building my own art.  Through Larry’s intuition and awareness, I was finally on the path leading me to finding my own voice.

 

By 1992 I began seriously working, exploring techniques with my palettes on paper. In short, I was creating images, using my palettes in a collage technique. From my first piece, a surreal and abstract landscape, "Of Sleeping Warriors, Of Spirit Buffalo, Of Phantom Highways," I started seeing images literally jumping out of this image. The piece was populated with impressionistic figures of animals (real and mythic) faces, bodies, imagined creatures, suns, moons, stars, landscapes, planets, ghostly figures.

  My technique, in creating the angel images, involved first finding an angel painting from the Fourteenth through the Seventeenth Century that resonated with me on physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.  I then made a print of it, and started turning it into my own image, or “own angel," through retouching, re-drawing and eliminating, or almost eliminating the facial features.  Eliminating the facial features I gave the image a more universal “feel.”   
  Once the angel was right for my purpose, I then put it on a clear plastic film and turned to my palettes for the background art.  Once I had found the right background, and position, for that image, the piece was finished.  Now I had the “original original”, or what I often referred to as the finished art, from which I could make any kind of print, at any size, scan it for digital purposes, or have it transferred to photographic paper or canvas, which I would have mounted, and then re-paint the image with dyes, acrylics or add any other materials that were appropriate.
 

The spontaneity of the pieces that followed brought about a freedom of design, fluidity of technique, and a subconscious quality. They seem to evoke the universal processes of memory, imagination and the dream state, raw experience pieced together into metaphors of innerlife, expanded and transformed by the mysterious logic of the hidden, unconscious self.

 
 

The viewer discovers new images that emerge from the work every time it’s looked at, and I am always discovering hidden images when I begin the process of assembling it. I work in other disciplines and techniques, the one common theme being the use of my own palettes, whether it be acrylic on canvas, assemblies on board or paper; it all comes, hopefully, from the spiritual, the mental and the physical.

 

I began creating the angel images, first from an intuitive feeling that I had to make them, and then soon after that, very much in the same mode as the experience with my father, I heard a voice saying to make “a series of angels.”  Still, I was not personally aware of the major meaning behind this series.  I did, however, feel that any series with angels would be conducive in helping me heal some of my own personal issues.  It seemed logical and rational that any positive input could have that effect.  When I said to my father “this angel will protect you,” I was still not aware of the big picture behind the images.  Only after the emotional and powerful experience with him was the meaning behind the series made known and clear to me, resonating with my consciousness.  Since that time some of the most joyous moments of my life have been in sharing these images with others.

 

 
 

As of the beginning of 2007 there are fourteen angel images in the series, twelve presently on the website. Other series of my art include:  The Warriors, The West, The Western Haiku, Bridging Heaven and Earth (one image), The Starbucks Haikus, and The Lakota Spirits.

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