Robert Josiah Bingaman is an American painter whose work explores landscape as a site of memory, projection, and psychological experience. Working from photographs made during travels and encounters with the built and natural world, Bingaman transforms familiar subjects—swimming pools, forests, mountains, houses, highways, and other fragments of the American landscape—into images that hover between representation and abstraction.
Bingaman grew up in a semi-suburban Midwestern environment, where designed landscapes and ordinary architecture existed alongside expansive natural spaces. That tension between constructed and natural environments continues to inform his work. Rather than approaching landscape as straightforward description, Bingaman uses it as a structure through which to examine memory, desire, isolation, uncertainty, and the experience of being simultaneously drawn toward and unsettled by a place.
His long-running Night Pools series depicts swimming pools illuminated against surrounding darkness. Seen from above, the pools appear as luminous, irregular fields of color floating within otherwise nearly impenetrable space. Familiar signs of recreation and suburban domestic life become mysterious and psychologically charged. Their simplified geometries can initially register as abstraction, while small details—a diving board, ladder, edge, or reflection—gradually return the viewer to the physical world.
Travel is central to Bingaman's practice. Photographs made while moving through the United States and abroad become an archive from which paintings may emerge months or years later. Mountains, wooded landscapes, distant horizons, houses, and roadside architecture are filtered through memory and the physical process of painting rather than reproduced as literal records of place. Across these bodies of work, Bingaman is less interested in documenting a particular landscape than in reconstructing the sensation of encountering it.
Literature provides another framework for his thinking. Writers including Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, and David Foster Wallace offer parallel investigations of landscape, memory, wandering, and unstable perception. The resulting images often carry a narrative charge without resolving into a specific story.
At Haw Contemporary, Bingaman has presented the solo exhibitions Memorial (2016), There in Spirit (2020), The Night Window (2021), Violet Road (2024), Paintings for Algorithm (2025), and Beyond (2025). Together, these exhibitions trace the evolution of his practice through psychologically charged landscapes, nocturnal scenes, memory, mortality, abstraction, and the act of painting itself. He has also participated in Haw Contemporary group exhibitions including 9 (2014), on behalf of one's obsessions (2014–15), something clear (2020), and Natural Law (2025).
Bingaman received his BFA in Painting from the University of Kansas in 2005 and his MFA in Visual Art from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. He lives and works in Humboldt, Kansas.
