Bobbie Moline-Kramer

Bobbie Moline-Kramer was born in Fort Madison, Iowa, in 1946, and is now based in California. She traces her interest in art to a course she took at a local community college with Conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari, and to assistant work she did with Allan Kaprow, the originator of “Happenings.” From 1964 to ’74, she lived in a San Diego artist’ commune, and, in 1981, received her BFA with a double major in Biology and Illustration from California State University, Long Beach, having transferred there from Art Center College of Design. 

For the next twenty years, Moline-Kramer worked as a biomedical and commercial illustrator, and was for a time the president and chairman of the board of the Society of Illustrators, Los Angeles. During this period she continued to develop her art practice, eventually devoting herself to it full-time in 2006. Since 1994, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions at commercial and institutional venues throughout California, as well as in New York and elsewhere, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA; and Long Beach Museum of Art.

As a painter, Moline-Kramer has pioneered a unique fusion of hyperrealism and gestural abstraction; she has also worked in mixed media. Drawing on personal narrative alongside art-historical reference, she has produced several distinct series while maintaining a deliberate compositional heterogeneity. Her “Face to Face” series explores the possibility of psychologically acute trompe l’oeil portraiture, while the later, closely related, “Color-Coded Emotions” series combines these depictions with abstract marks and textural fragments. “As Above, So Below” also incorporates both figurative and abstract elements, though here the latter dominates in the form of paint layered over life drawings to create impressionistic landscapes. And for the series “Musical Brushstrokes,” she collaborated with Geoff Levin to unite painterly and vocal composition.  

In conjunction with exhibiting her work, Moline-Kramer gives interviews and participates in panel discussions about and around her work. She also teaches oil painting technique and lectures on her professional practice, including as an adjunct professor at California State University, Long Beach.