About the Artist
About the Artist
Robert Senske, Jr. (b.1965) is a fourth generation Long Beach native whose family roots are etched within the city’s history.
His great grandfather, William Young, owned a furniture store on Pine Avenue in downtown Long Beach during the early 1900’s and his grandfather, Vaile “Bud” Young (1906-1976), attended Carroll Park Elementary school with best friend and city father Lewellyn “Bix” Bixby. While one would grow up to preside over the real estate empire for which entire neighborhoods and parks have been named, the other would become Harry Buffum’s right hand man as President of Long Beach’s legendary department store chain, “Buffums”, a brand still uttered with courtly reverence to this day.
Senske’s other grandfather, Jack Senske, Sr., was a tough-as-nails foreman on Long Beach harbor’s distinctive oil producing platforms known back then as the “THUMS oil islands”. Between these roots and an idyllic upbringing on the Alamitos Bay peninsula, the artist grew up aquatic and creative.
“Bobbo”, as many of his closest friends called this highly energetic kid with platinum blonde locks, was born with a thunderbolt of artistic talent and began selling limited edition prints of his free-hand pen & ink drawings of local marina scenes through a gallery at the age of 14. An excellent student as well, he attended Cal Berkeley on a partial journalism scholarship and graduated with a degree in Political Science in 1987. Without any formal training, he developed a highly photorealistic painting style using acrylic paints and within a sunny California palette that one avid collector described as, “the maritime love-child of Norman Rockwell and David Hockney.” His very first show in 1992 was a sell-out with all eighteen 24”x36” land and seascapes claimed within a two-day period at an average price of $450.
Since then, he has published more original acrylic paintings featuring the Long Beach coast than any other artist, probably ever, and his skill-set and nautical know-how are on par with the best in the business. Early collectors included the Bixby family, legendary Knight-Ridder News Service publishers Dan and Frani Ridder, as well as the former three-term Mayor of Long Beach, the Honorable Beverly O’Neill (1994-2006). Even Dr. Robert Gumbiner, who founded the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach (1996) and who favored Latin expressionism over realism, admitted to the artist, “You’re very good at what you do,” when he commissioned Senske to render his waterfront estate.
In 1998, he was honored by the American Society of Marine Artists with an exhibit at the prestigious Newport Harbor Nautical Museum (“A Brush with the Sea”) in Newport Beach, California, along with paintings from an international cast of artists, including Englishman John Stobart, who was considered one of the best in the world at the time.
In 2021, Long Beach Airport installed over twenty murals of Senske’s most iconic paintings throughout the entire concourse as testament to his body of work.
But regardless of his deep connection with one city, Senske’s natural gift for portraying water in its various forms and seacraft (he gets the rigging right), along with spot-on portraiture put him at an elite level within his genre and the increasing value of his originals over the years reflects this fact. The good news is that this site was built specifically to offer affordable reproductions in all shapes and sizes that are ready-to-hang and should appeal to a anyone who loves the ocean, the California climate and the coastal lifestyle it creates.
With the world coming to Los Angeles in 2028, the artist will continue to focus on promoting the west coast and southern California in particular, to the rest of the world through his paintings.
