Painting, for me, is a way of slowing down perception—of allowing color, surface, and structure to unfold over time rather than all at once.
—Robert Jessup

Robert Jessup is an American painter best known for his rigorously structured abstractions that explore the physical and perceptual properties of paint. Working primarily in oil, Jessup builds his compositions through repeated layering, scraping, and reworking, allowing color to emerge as both material and experience. His paintings resist immediacy; instead, they reward sustained looking, revealing subtle shifts in hue, rhythm, and surface as the viewer’s eye moves across the canvas. Deeply informed by modernist traditions yet resolutely contemporary in approach, Jessup’s practice emphasizes process, duration, and restraint. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally and is held in numerous public and private collections. Through a disciplined engagement with color and form, Jessup’s paintings offer a contemplative space where structure and sensation coexist.