Post-War California artist, Robert Pearson McChesney became an Abstract Expressionist painter, assemblage artist, printmaker, sculptor and teacher. He was born in Marshall, Missouri, and with the exception of a year in Mexico, 1951, and World War II military service aboard a ship, he spent his career in California where he moved in 1936. He lived and had his studio north of San Francisco in Petaluma, atop Sonoma Mountain. Considered one of the "progenitors of Bay Area abstract expressionism", he had influence far beyond his home town. Exhibition venues were in New York at the Whitney Museum, Chicago at the Art Institute and San Francisco at the Museum of Modern Art.
He studied at Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri from 1933-1934, and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1936 to 1937 with Fred Conway.

Robert McChesney worked in the mural division of the Works Progress Administration from 1938-1940 and in this capacity did ship murals for the "USS Monterey" and for the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition where he collaborated with twenty-five other artists. In the 1940s he was assistant to Anton Refrigier in creating murals for the Rincon Annex Post Office in San Francisco. During World War II, he was a merchant marine who regularly shipped in and out of San Francisco. He later attributed of his interest in abstract painting to this period when he, aboard ship, would spend hours watching the shapes and forms in the water and the play of light upon them.

McChesney's working method has been to lay the ground for his painting on a flat surface, apply paint with a squeeze bottle and then add found objects. He said: "When this whole thing sets up, I've got what I call a 'chaotic condition', and it's my job ot get rid of the chaos and build an abstract composition. It's amazing --- the different shapes and forms and how they colorize together and produce this chaos. After it sets up, that's where the work begins." (Howell)

McChesney was married to Mary Fuller McChesney, artist and author. He taught at the California Labor School, Art Department, 1948-1949; California School of Fine Arts, 1949-1951; and served on the San Francisco Art Institute Board of Directors, 1965-1966.
In July 2000, at the time of the opening of a McChesney's retrospective of seventy paintings in Santa Rosa, he was described by newspaper writer Daedalus Howell: "The usual adjectives used to describe active octogenarians don't apply to McChesney. He isn't spry, for example--he's goddamn robust. His conversation is peppered with such anachronistic hipsterisms as "You dig?" and his eyes actively search his surroundings. Often garbed like some order of beatnik cowboy in a turtleneck, cowboy hat, and full silver beard under which lurks a bolo tie, McChesney is more than an "American painter. He's an American original--and it shows in his art."

Solo Exhibitions included Raymond & Raymond Gallery, San Francisco, 1944; Pat Wall Gallery, Monterey, 1946; Lucien Labaudt Gallery, 1947, 1951; San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949, 1953; Gump's Gallery, 1952, 1953, 1955; California School of Fine Arts, 1957; Reed College, Portland, 1959; Bolles Gallery, San Francisco, 1959, 1961, 1962, (New York), 1970, 1971; San Francisco Art Center, 1964; Twentieth Century West, New York, 1965; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, 1974; San Francisco Cultural Center, 1984; California Museum of Art, Santa Rosa, 1988; Carlson Gallery, San Francisco, 1990.

Group Exhibitions included: First Spring Annual Exhibition, California Palace of The Legion of Honor 1946; Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1948; The Oakland Museum, California. A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950; 1973; San Francisco Museum of Art, Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era 1976; Laguna Art Museum & San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, 1996.

Source:
Daedalus Howell, 'Enduring Visions', "Sonoma County Independent", July 6-12, 2000
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
David J Carlson, Carlson Gallery
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"