Robin
Weiss

Robin Weiss is a plein air oil painter working from Poulsbo on the Kitsap Peninsula. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he began drawing at an early age and matured under the mentorship of his high school art teacher Louis Penfield. With Penfield, he sketched and painted from life, building a studio adjacent to Penfield's home — a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The discipline started early, and the visual education was unusually direct.

During his time in the US Navy, he painted ship scenes in watercolor. He later relocated to Washington and studied architectural engineering at Olympic College alongside art coursework, eventually committing to painting full time. Early influences were Deanne Lemley and Jane Wallace, both successful local Pacific Northwest artists. In 2006 he joined the Daily Painters movement after reading about Duane Keiser and Julian Merrow Smith — a discipline of finishing one painting a day that compressed years of practice into a sustained technical leap.

He paints, teaches, and shows from Knowles Studio in Poulsbo, alongside printmaker Leigh Knowles Metteer. His subjects are the ones directly around him: Liberty Bay in morning light, working boats at Kingston Marina, the architecture of small Northwest towns. The technique reads as paint behavior translated to space — deliberate opacity in the foreground sitting thickly on the canvas, his application thinning toward the background where the evergreen shoreline softens into atmospheric distance.

His paintings are represented at galleries throughout the West — Cole Gallery in Edmonds, Michael Birawer Gallery in Seattle, Carrie Goller Gallery, Oh Be Joyful Gallery in Colorado, Front Street Gallery in Poulsbo, and Alki Arts in West Seattle — and were shown for years through Roby King Gallery on Bainbridge Island, the legacy program JG Art Gallery now continues.