The Art of Living Creatively

Inside Robin Winfield’s hidden Carmel gallery, art, family, community and a life built around the practice of looking closely.

There is a particular pleasure in discovering something in Carmel-by-the-Sea that does not immediately announce itself.

To find Robin Winfield, you leave the street and follow a brick path into one of the town’s tucked-away courtyards, where white stucco walls rise around a small garden dense with impatiens and greenery. Iron lanterns punctuate the walls. Terra-cotta roof tiles appear overhead. A red umbrella flashes through an opening farther down the passage. The architecture folds inward, revealing itself slowly.

Then, almost hidden in the back corner, a small sign appears: Robin Winfield Gallery. Contemporary Art.

Robin is standing in the doorway.

The gallery is only about 200 square feet, but stepping inside feels less like entering a conventional exhibition space than entering the physical archive of a creative life. Paintings climb the walls and lean against one another on the floor. A long Persian rug runs through the center of the room beneath dark wood ceiling beams. Books fill shelves. Frames are stacked and waiting. A glass cabinet holds jewelry and small objects. There are tools, photographs, works in progress and the quiet evidence of things being made.

Nothing feels overly staged. Everything feels used.

And everywhere, there are buildings.

Storefronts. Doorways. Windows. Cornices. Industrial façades. Lonely stretches of sidewalk. Architectural fragments that might belong to San Francisco, India, St. Louis or somewhere remembered imperfectly from years ago.

This is the world as Robin Winfield sees it: not as a sweeping panorama, but as a collection of details worth stopping for.

“I love going out and photographing,” she tells me. “You drop me in a city somewhere, and I’m happy just wandering around, getting lost.”

What she searches for are the things many people pass without noticing: repeating patterns, reflections, unusual architectural details, the geometry of a wall or the peculiar character of a doorway.

Photography, however, is only the beginning.

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Between Photograph and Painting

Robin has been developing her distinctive mixed-media process for more than three decades, although arriving at it was anything but direct.

Art had always been present. As a child she took ceramics and art classes, and later majored in art in college, moving between printmaking, architecture, sculpture, drawing and painting without finding a single medium that felt entirely her own. Photography remained a constant. With money from a summer job, she bought her first camera and began a practice of looking that would follow her throughout her life.

There were years in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, raising oysters and waitressing while making small paintings and ceramics. There was sewing, wearable art, quilts and wall hangings. She describes those fabric pieces as a kind of “painting with fabric.” Eventually, after returning to St. Louis and taking a mixed-media class, something clicked.

She began attaching photographs to canvas and building around them with paint, fabric, newspaper and found objects.

Then one day, she painted outward from the photograph.

“Oh, my gosh. This is it,” she remembers thinking.

She has essentially been exploring that idea ever since. Today, her photographs are mounted onto wood panels, creating a more archival foundation from which painting begins. A photograph may occupy the center of the composition, or it may be pushed toward an edge. Sometimes it is immediately identifiable. Other times Robin paints so extensively over and around it that the boundary between photograph and invention nearly disappears.

Standing in the gallery, this ambiguity becomes part of the experience.

From across the room, a piece might read as a quiet urban landscape. Step closer and the surface begins to reveal itself. Matte areas meet gloss. Painted geometry intersects photographic reality. A shadow might belong to the original image or to Robin’s imagined continuation of it. The longer you look, the less certain you become about where documentation ends and painting begins.

Robin likes it that way.

She describes being drawn to the surreal quality that can emerge when an image seems to “drop off the edge of the earth.” Often, she no longer remembers what actually existed beyond the boundaries of the original photograph. Instead, she invents it. A photograph taken in India in 2008 can reappear years later and become the seed of an entirely new environment.

Composition is carefully considered before anything is adhered. Robin moves the photograph around a blank panel with tape, deciding how much sky she wants, how much ground, whether a door should remain centered or shift to one side. Even after a work feels finished, she may return months or a year later and discover that it needs another element to carry the eye through the composition.

That instinct for structure traces directly back to her father.

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A Family Made Around Art

Robin grew up in St. Louis in a household where creativity was less an extracurricular pursuit than part of the architecture of everyday life.

Her father was an artist and teacher. Her mother was creative in her own right. With four children in the family, museum visits, gallery openings and artists were simply part of growing up. On family trips east to visit relatives, museums inevitably appeared on the itinerary. Robin remembers being a child moving from bench to bench, impatient to get outside and play. Only later did she understand the significance of what she had been absorbing.

Her father never pushed his children toward art. Remarkably, they found their way there anyway.

Her older brother Chris is a painter with a gallery just down the block from Robin in Carmel. Her late brother David became a woodworker and sculptor whose work Robin remembers as quirky, playful and strange. Her younger sister Nancy paints as well, including industrial scenes inspired by the port during years spent in San Francisco. Different mediums, different perspectives, but the same underlying impulse to make.Robin’s father also taught her something that continues to shape her work: composition.

Structure and balance, he taught her, were fundamental. But perhaps an even greater inheritance was watching someone build a life around creative work. He taught while continuously accepting commissions, drawing, working in silver, making jewelry and designing stained glass. His most significant stained-glass work was the Space Window at Washington National Cathedral. Robin remembers his constant drive to create and to ask himself what he would make next.That legacy is literally hanging from Robin’s ears as we speak.

Against her silver-gray hair is a pair of handmade earrings, each resembling a tiny, slightly fantastical building. Perhaps an Italian villa. Perhaps something vaguely Asian in influence. Perhaps nowhere at all.

Robin smiles when I ask.

They come from her imagination.

She has made hundreds over the years, and no two are quite the same. Some have two windows, some three, some four. She calls them “a little wonky,” which seems precisely the point. The earrings are made from 99.9 percent fine silver using repoussé, a technique her father taught her. She works the thin sheet from side to side, pushing and pulling the metal to create ornamentation and dimension, then pierces, fills and stabilizes it with solder before buffing, tarnishing and polishing the finished piece.Looking at the earring beside one of her paintings, the connection is unmistakable.

Architecture has escaped the panel and become something she wears.

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A Life in the Art Colony

It is tempting to think of an artist’s life as something that happens privately, inside a studio, protected from everything beyond it.

Robin’s life in Carmel suggests almost the opposite.

Her creative practice is deeply entangled with community.

She serves as president of the board of the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, an institution she describes as one of Carmel’s hidden gems. The Cherry encompasses a gallery, theater and sculpture garden, with programming that moves between visual art, jazz, poetry and performance. Its mission resonates deeply with her: providing artists with room to experiment without forcing the work to conform to commercial expectations.

Robin has also spent years on the board of the Carmel Women’s Club, another role that has brought her into contact with people she might otherwise never have met. At a recent creative program, she discovered that people she knew through entirely different contexts were quietly making paintings, glasswork and sculptural totems of their own.

It is a small observation, but perhaps an essential one for understanding Carmel.

Creativity here often hides in plain sight.

The person sitting beside you at an event may be a painter. Someone you meet in a garden may have been a dancer. A gallery owner may also be an artist. A photographer may turn up on a gallery walk. Conversations migrate from courtyards to exhibitions to living rooms and back again.

Robin participates in the Center for Photographic Art’s photo walks as a photographer and Carmel’s gallery walks as a painter and gallery owner. Even her location seems to embody the peculiar intimacy of the town. Her brother’s gallery is down the block aptly named Winfield Gallery. Her own is tucked down two alleys in the middle of Carmel.

The art colony is not simply history here.

It is a network of people continually crossing paths.

And, in Robin’s case, one of those crossings changed her life.

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The Night the Stars Aligned

In 2001, Robin was working one day a week for her friend Nancy Dodds at her gallery, helping with receptions and putting out food.

One Saturday evening, she was walking across to Nielsen’s when a man she knew casually recognized her. He was standing with another man named Ron.

Robin looked at them and jokingly called out, “Dudes in Carmel,” inviting them across to the gallery opening.

Ron came.

They put on music. They danced.

And then the sky began performing too.

It was November 17, 2001, a night Robin remembers for an extraordinary display of shooting stars. She had been invited to another party and asked Ron if he wanted to come. They went together, and each time they considered leaving, another meteor streaked overhead.

Some appeared green.

So they stayed.

Eventually Ron asked for her number. Sunday passed without a call because, she later discovered, he had spent the day sailing. On Monday, while Robin was back working at the gallery, the phone rang.

“When can I see you again?” he asked.

“As soon as possible.”

“I’ll be over for lunch.”

And that was essentially that.

When Robin tells the story all these years later, the details remain beautifully intact: the gallery, the dancing, the date, the colors crossing the night sky. Ron is a sailor, intelligent, curious and, in Robin’s description, profoundly kind. Neither had been married before. Neither had children. Their lives simply seemed to fit.

“I think they did,” Robin says when I suggest that, in this case, the stars quite literally aligned.

There is something wonderfully Carmel about the whole thing.

An artist working at a gallery. Music playing after an opening. A chance invitation. A sailor. Shooting stars.

It sounds almost too perfectly composed, yet perhaps that is what makes it feel at home here.

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Living Creatively

Back inside Robin’s gallery, the room begins to feel different after hearing her story.

The shelves of books are no longer simply shelves. The jewelry cabinet is not merely a display case. The earrings are connected to her father’s hands and to a technique passed between generations. The paintings hold photographs made while wandering cities around the world. The gallery itself sits within walking distance of her brother’s. Her community work extends beyond its walls into institutions helping ensure that another generation of artists has somewhere to experiment, exhibit, perform and gather.

Even the crowdedness of the room feels appropriate.

There is a lot of life in here.

Robin admits that community involvement can occasionally take time away from her own work. But perhaps the distinction between the two is not quite so clean. Serving an arts organization, meeting another maker, attending an opening, traveling, photographing, dancing, listening to blues, making a pair of earrings, sitting quietly with an unfinished painting and waiting to understand what it needs: all of it belongs to the same creative ecosystem.

Robin once hosted a blues program on KAZU for more than a decade and emceed the Monterey Blues Festival for years. She loves music, travel and adventure. She has also built a presence far beyond Carmel, exhibiting her work across the country, from Nashville and New Orleans to St. Louis, Aspen and Sedona, as well as closer to home at the Carl Cherry Center and Monterey Museum of Art. For 36 years, her work has been represented by the Rice Polak Gallery, a relationship sustained through the kind of trust and connection she has formed with gallery owners such as Marla Rice. It is another thread in Robin’s story: a creative life built not only through making, but through relationships that endure.

And she is still looking.

Still photographing.

Still making.

After 36 years working with her particular combination of photography and painting, Robin says she simply has not grown tired of it. Each place changes the work: new colors, new architecture, new subjects, new details to notice.

Perhaps that is the thread running through everything.

To live creatively is to remain interested.

Interested in the wall everyone else walks past. Interested in the person sitting beside you. Interested in what might happen if a photograph is moved three inches to the left. Interested in an old technique your father once taught you. Interested enough to wander down an alley, through a courtyard, around another corner.

Carmel was built, in part, by people who believed a life could be organized around those instincts. Artists came here to make things, certainly, but also to gather, exchange ideas, form institutions, fall in love and create a community in which imagination was given room to become a way of life.

More than a century later, traces of that Carmel still exist.

You find them in places like Robin Winfield’s gallery.

Eventually, I step back through the doorway and into the courtyard. The white stucco catches the muted afternoon light. Impatiens lean into the brick walkway. The iron lanterns wait for evening. Somewhere beyond the walls is the center of Carmel, but from here it feels surprisingly far away.

Behind me, in a tiny gallery hidden down two alleys, paintings are stacked against the walls.

Books crowd the shelves. Small silver buildings wait inside a jewelry case. An artist is still at work.

And for a moment, the old art colony does not feel old at all.

It feels alive.