Encounter: Robin Cruise – Hamburg, Germany
~ by Sivan Ravivo
One day I received a like on an Instagram post I made by Robin Cruise. I immediately checked out his account because ‘Robin Cruise’, what a fascinating name. It led me to an artist with very colorful work about nature and animals, a happy smiling guy standing in front of his paintings in his art gallery. Later, when we met each other digitally I found out that his real name is Robin Andrae and Robin Cruise is his artist’s name, inspired by the novel. Creativity runs in the family as his dad (Thomas Andrae) is an illustrator.
To incorporate painting more in his life Robin took on a challenge to make 500 paintings a year. He gets up every day around 5:30 and paints. People often ask him where he gets the inspiration and ideas from to make so many paintings. He explains that when he goes to bed, he tells himself he wants to wake up in the morning with an idea and this always happens. He finds that in the night, when we suppose to sleep the subconscious is very active and this helps with inspiration, it just comes to him. He tells me I should really try to do this when I have things that I need an idea for. Because of this challenge he makes a lot of progress in his art and style, and it guides him to different directions. I ask him about his gallery, this gallery is his bedroom filled with hundreds of paintings!
He paints nature and animal life. Figurative, simple, and aesthetically. Wanting to create more awareness on the beauty of nature and animal life is what drives him in his art. The project ‘encounters’ is one I am very fascinated by; it feels like there are many layers to this work. Robin explains that animal encounters are a lot like human encounters with different emotions. There is a lot of interaction in animal life. For example, you can’t see a bird isolated from the outside world, it is always part of a context, of a whole and interacts like us humans with its social environment. I love it that we connect so much on this subject. There are so many people that I meet in this project that talk about this ‘inter-beingness’. It warms my heart to feel all the good in this world.