2019 was a great year for Bob Van Starr. I had my first painting in an actual art exhibit. I also sent many paintings to excellent eateries, and other establishments. All in all a great year for art!

“CottonCandyChaos” (c) Bob Van Starr (Nicholas Johnson) 2019.
I call this abstract Cotton Candy Chaos. I had a very stressful evening here in early 2019. So instead of working on coloring a few pages on a new yet unannounced comic book I have been working on as planed. I decided to do a water color/designer marker abstract. About halfway through creating this piece I decided it really needed a big ol’ cotton candy snack in part of the space I had remaining. I love the way it turned out. This painting looks excellent in its frame. I think imma keep it.

I call this piece “TheFlippedLid.” A flipped lid is a psychological term wherein you loose your mind, and it takes a bit of time for your lid to “Un-flip.” I had the idea for this painting back at a psychological conference I was at back in the fall of 2018. I finally painted it.

I got hit by a massive snow-storm. I loved it though because I got to spent a majority of my day painting, and being creative. I think this is one of my favorite paintings that I have ever done.

(c) Feb 22 2019. Bob Van Starr, and Nicholas Johnson
So I live in Maine, and the other day we had a very big storm. So I tried to stay warm by painting this water color of the beach.

(c) Bob Van Starr, and Nicholas Johnson February 22nd 2019
Often times when I paint with water color I test my colors out on a separate sheet of paper. After the paint gets done drying I like to draw pictures of what I see in the colors, then add a little bit to make something funky.

(c) Bob Van Starr, and Nicholas Johnson. Feb 22 2019.
I was teaching an english class, and in that class we were doing an assignment on visual poetry. I like to be able to demonstrate to my students what I want them to attempt to accomplish. I completed this just in the nick of time, and all of my students thought it was very funny (or they were just trying to humor me either way.)

“AbstractHeart.” (c) Bob Van Starr 4/3/19.
I did this abstract on my actual birthday of February ninth 2018. A lot of people seemed to like this one more than most abstracts that I do. Seriously who knows?

“KungPowBockli.” (c) Bob Van Starr 4/3/19
This is how I feel after I order Chinese food. Seriously Though…

This is one of my favorite paintings of mine from 2019. I called this painting YEET, and this is a combination of several different types of paints. Most of the paint included in this composition are oil, acrylic, and spry paint.

I called this piece ALL INK ABSTRACT, because this is just me playing around with a singular black pen. I end up drawing quite a few of these over the course of a year mainly when I have writers block. I really enjoyed the way this one looked, and several people also really enjoyed this image.

I called this image DESK CANDY. Most of these style pictures that I produce are the result of me testing colors for one of the many comics I concurrently work on. You never what color will match the scene the best, so I end up testing several colors on paper. This particular test page I thought looked very appealing so I did some doodles over it, and this was the result.

I experimented a lot with ink pours in 2019. This was one of the best results from those experiments. I really like how this painting turned out. I called this one “PluggedIn.” The interesting part about this painting is that I had doodles underneath this particular abstract, which are the drawing you see beneath the ink pours. What I really like about those ink pours is the great combination of colors that you get by using that type of ink.