Rob Erdle: Painting a landscape

Rob Erdle's interest in landscape developed as he grew up looking at farmland, rolling hills and sierras on the Fresno, Calif., horizon. Now, the Regents Professor in the School of Visual Arts focuses on a wide variety of terrain in his artwork.

When he enrolled at a junior college in Reedley — a suburb of Fresno — Erdle planned to turn his love of the land into a career as a landscape architecture major. After classes began, he found his love of art.

"I had to take a few watercolor classes that were required for my degree," Erdle says. "They really seemed fun, so I decided to take more art classes."

Erdle now teaches and oversees watercolor classes for undergraduate and graduate art students as well as beginners who may not be art or painting majors.

Of all his paintings, Erdle's favorite is a 1995 painting of Lake Ray Roberts that the City of Denton owns. It currently hangs in the city council chamber.

The painting is included in a book released in China last spring that records a 25-year survey of Erdle's work. He has also been featured in a video made at UNT for a Chinese public broadcasting station.

"In China, there is a vast audience for artists, and the book was a collaboration between enterprise and the artistic community," Erdle says.

He and his wife, Millie Giles, a lecturer in the School of Visual Arts, have both been featured in Watercolor magazine.

In addition to painting landscapes, Erdle also photographs them. As an amateur photographer, he was able to capture landscape in southern France from a rare angle earlier last month while lecturing in Toulouse.

"In France, I stayed on a farm with people who had a hot air balloon," Erdle says. "I had an interesting viewpoint and was able to get some great shots of the ravines, river valleys, deep gorges and cliffs. The land was like Texas' hill country, with a lot of hills, but no major mountains."

When he is not painting or photographing landscape, he works with it at his own home. Yard work is one of Erdle's hobbies.

"It gives me a chance to re-create landscapes within landscapes," Erdle says.

BY JENNY McCORMACK paiswri2@unt.edu

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