Artist Mimi Robinson’s life resembles a unique and colorful palette, much like those she generates in her inspired plein air watercolors and personal visual journals.
A skilled designer and international design consultant, Mimi travels the world, from Peru to Kyrgyzstan, advising local artists. For this facet of her work, she is equipped with business acumen honed by many years interfacing with artisan enterprises, social entrepreneurs, wholesalers and retailers. She hopes to preserve heritage crafts and create pathways for artisans to enter local, regional and international markets, providing Indigenous communities with economic independence and opportunities for young people to remain in their communities. She also works as the creative director for Rise Beyond the Reef, which addresses the needs of remote Indigenous Pacific communities, and recently curated the Smithsonian Folklife Festival Marketplace in Washington, D.C.
Unlike many artists who work intuitively, Mimi has devised a philosophy of color, which she explains in her book, “Local Color: Seeing Place Through Watercolor,” published by Princeton Architectural Press. She teaches her ideas and methods in workshops to help people sharpen their powers of observation and to raise consciousness of their world, the places they live and the colors that are all there.
Mimi creates palettes of colors wherever she goes, putting swatches of watercolor on scrap paper to replicate the colors she observes in the environment. Even an ordinary walk down the streets in her hometown of Petaluma is an opportunity to observe nuances of color and light. She invents names for the colors she’s mixed to create a more personal connection. Ochre could be renamed “Summer Grasses”; a grey might be called “Jackrabbit.” She encourages her students to do the same. “Looking back at the palettes brings me back to the time and place. It’s a way of keeping memories,” she writes. “Each place has a specific color range and an identity. Looking at a palette of a summer day on a cold February night can help to bring back that experience.”
Mimi comes from an artistic family. Her mother was a painter, and her father gave up law to illustrate children’s books. She painted from an early age and later attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in painting. Much of the time, she is now on the road, traveling off the beaten track to places in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caribbean. Recently, she has been working with weavers in the South Pacific Islands. Her work is supported by a range of N.G.O.s, governments and private institutions that share an interest in supporting independent businesses and fair-trade practices. When Mimi is invited into a project, her process runs a dual track, with weeks of research followed by work in the field.
Local color plays an important role for artisans all over the world. In Peru, she says, “the natural color of the animals they tend—alpaca, llama and vicuna—creates hues of browns, creamy whites, silver, grey, browns and blacks.” Purple tones come from the Ahuaypili leaf. In Haiti, she says, “paintings are colorful, vibrant and inspired by the tropics.” In Fiji, artisans are inspired by the color of the local flora. By creating color palettes, she encourages artisans to become more conscious of the colors of their environment, work that often feeds into new design ideas.
An exhibition of Mimi’s recent personal work, titled “The Home of Our Belonging,” is on display at the Dance Palace from March 1 to 30, curated by Ginny Felch. The selection, in watercolor and gouache, ranges from small and delicate studies of local flora to larger familiar vistas like the Giacomini Wetlands and the Muddy Hollow Trail. She says the title of the show reflects her long-term relationship with Point Reyes, where she returns often to observe the quality of light in the landscapes and the finest details of color in plant life.
An opening reception takes place on March 12 from 3 to 5p.m. at the Dance Palace. Joyce Kouffman will perform music.
Ellen Shehadeh has written for the Light, the West Marin Citizen, the Pacific Sun and the North Bay Bohemian, and interviewed artists and authors on KWMR, for 15 years. She lives in Inverness.