ROBERT YOUNG
1936 - 2012
“He’s an inner-directed achiever who would scoff at the word ‘genius.’ To him it was a function of going to work every day with complete absorption.”
A LIFE IMMERSED.
THE MAN WHO NEVER CAME UP.
“When Bob Young put on a diving mask back in the ’40s and dove below the surface of the ocean at old El Morro, he was as transmogrified as St. Paul on the road to Damascus.
In an aesthetic sense, he never came up again.”
— Dion Wright
Sculptor and longtime friend of Robert Young
Robert Young was born in 1936 and grew up along the Southern California coast. Long before the ocean became the subject of his paintings, it was part of his life. As a boy, he explored the waters off El Morro, Laguna Beach. He later worked as a lifeguard at Scotchman’s Cove and served as a Marine, spending time in Hawaiʻi.
The relationship would last a lifetime. For some forty years, Young dove the waters of California, Hawaiʻi, Mexico and the Caribbean, returning again and again to the studio to paint what he had experienced beneath the surface.
FINDING HIS LANGUAGE.
Robert Young at the Festival of Arts, 1959.
Robert Young came of age as an artist in the creative community of Laguna Beach. He attended UC Santa Barbara before continuing his art studies at Chouinard Art Institute and later earned his MFA from Otis Art Institute in 1962.
In 1959, while still a student, Young began exhibiting at Laguna Beach’s Festival of Arts.
His artistic language was already beginning to emerge. Passionate washes of color—pure movement, rhythm and energy—formed the foundation of his paintings. As his work developed, fish and other forms seemed to emerge from those currents of paint.
In 1968, Young helped found the Sawdust Festival, serving as its first grounds manager. Laguna Beach would remain both his home and the center of his artistic life.
BENEATH THE SURFACE.
Young’s paintings grew from decades spent underwater. Rather than simply depicting marine life, he sought to recreate the experience of seeing beneath the surface — shifting light, layered color, and forms that seem to appear and disappear as the eye moves through the painting.
Fish, coral and other sea life emerge from washes of color, dense fields of dots and overlapping forms. The boundary between abstraction and observation is constantly shifting.
ALL STOPS ALONG THE SAME HIGHWAY.
“Young left a suite of smaller works as well, all stops along the same highway: well-defined, harmonious, pointillist surprises from under the sea, with a cast of thousands.”
— Dion Wright
THE BIG ONE.
The Big One brought Robert Young’s evolving visual language to monumental scale. Begun in 1969 and worked on until 1978, the 15-foot canvas brought together the passionate washes, intricate brushwork, layered color and submerged light that had developed across decades of painting.
“I had over 50 fish swimming around in there. They kept changing and reappearing. All my light sources began to channel themselves toward the center of the painting and light started to emerge from within.”
— Robert Young
A LIFE OF COMPLETE ABSORPTION.
Robert Young’s life as an artist was not separate from everyday life. His home and studio, his family, the ocean and the paintings were all part of the same world.
He worked steadily, returning to the canvas day after day to “make his next move” sometimes for years. Paintings surrounded him in various stages of becoming—washed, layered, revisited and allowed to morph over time.
THE CANYON
Being a stone’s throw from The Sawdust Festival, Robert chose Laguna Canyon as his creative epicenter—a place from which both his life and his work and The Big One emerged.
After the devastating eucalyptus fall of 1978 destroyed the family home, Robert and his wife Deborah rebuilt it together by hand. For three months, they lived in the canyon in a tent with their three large dogs while the new house took shape.
On Roosevelt Lane, home and studio were interchangeable. Paintings filled the house and spilled outdoors into the canyon, where Robert sometimes worked beneath the open sky.
The Sawdust Festival became an annual ritual Robert never missed.
A LIFE BENEATH THE SURFACE.
For more than four decades, Robert Young returned again and again to the ocean as both diver and painter. What began with a diving mask off the Southern California coast became a lifetime of exploring and translating the world beneath the surface into color.
His paintings remain records of that lifelong ocean reverence—not simply pictures of the sea, but expressions of a world he experienced deeply and translated into his own visual language.
“The sea helps to establish one’s perspective and reverence for life.”
— Robert Young
LEGACY.
Robert Young passed in 2012, leaving behind a body of work shaped by a lifetime spent painting the deep.
Today, his work is cared for by his family, with his daughter Charlotte Young Massaquoi serving as curator of his artistic legacy. Through the preservation of his original paintings, exhibitions, archival work and his fine art estate, YOUNG SALT, the family continues to bring Robert’s underwater world and ocean reverence to new audiences.
At the center of that legacy remains The Big One — the monumental painting that occupied nearly a decade of his life, and which his family is now seeking to place permanently for future generations.