Robert James Foose

Robert James Foose was a major figure in Kentucky art in the 1970s and ’80s, both as an award-winning artist and as a teacher at the University of Kentucky. His atmospheric watercolors are heavily collected. He was also a printmaker and ran the Buttonwood Press. Often compared to the iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth, Foose was Chair of the Art Department of the University of Kentucky and, in addition to the Permanent Collection of the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, his work is also in the collections of the Speed Museum in Louisville and the Springfield Art Museum, Mo.  The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky honored Foose with a retrospective in 2002.

Born on October 17, 1938, in York, Pennsylvania, as the son of Clarence Norman and Rebecca Gillam (Gorsuch) Foose, Robert earned his Bachelor’s of Fine Art at the University of Kentucky in 1963. He went on to serve as the art director at University Press in Lexington, Kentucky for 18 years and served as the president of the Lexington Art League from 1969-1971 and the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen from 1972-1974. He was an art professor at the University of Kentucky from 1984 until his death in 2013.

Foose has been awarded recognition from several sources, including the Watercolor Society (Painting award, 1977), Blue Grass Painting Exhibition (Painting award, 1984), the Southern Watercolor Society (Painting award 1981, Gold medal 1981), and Kentucky Watercolor Society (Painting award 1983).  He was also a prominent member of the National Society of Arts and Letters and the Kentucky Arts Commission. Foose has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, receiving more than one hundred and fifty first-place awards for painting and printmaking.