Kaleidoscope Eyes: Artist Bob Qualters Gets a New Show, Talks a Long Life

Good visual art has the power to change how we see things. Spend time with Edward Hopper’s pictures, and the world begins to look stark and shadowy. The art of Bob Qualters can alter your mind’s eyeballs, too, but with a different sort of result. 

Qualters is a quintessential Pittsburgh artist. Born and raised in the region, a man who kept coming back after expeditions to California and beyond, he paints our cityscapes and people in ways that nobody else has quite done. And those ways convey an essence of being here that hits home. His paintings—part realistic, part dreamlike—sparkle with intertwined patches and fragments of shapes and colors. Angular buildings jostle with swooping curves of hills and clouds and bursts of flaming light. Devote face time to the Qualters view, and even on a grey wintry day, your eyes are opened to seeing the city as a kaleidoscopic wonderland. 

A rare chance to immerse in QualtersVision comes this Saturday eve and Sunday afternoon, January 10 -11, as the artist gets a pop-up retrospective show at the John A. Hermann Memorial Art Museum in Bellevue. (Details at the end of this article.) A generous total of over 120 artworks are slated for display. Yet they’re only a tiny slice of a long, ongoing artist’s life. 

How long? Let Bob himself speak it. He also happens to be a quintessential Pittsburgh intellectual—someone who can discourse on topics from existentialism to literary fiction, while punctuating an interview with comments like “I don’t know how the fuck I got to be 91 years old. That was never my intention.” 

Where Are Ideas Born? 

Qualters sat with this writer for a talk in his Squirrel Hill home in December. At the time, he was finishing a series of three painting-collages for the Bellevue show. Titled “Winter Night,” “Spring Rain,” and “Autumn Afternoon,” all came across to me as moody, semi-surreal city scenes, but not recognizable Pittsburgh scenes. “They are set in a city which I made up,” Qualters explained. 

He said the inspiration came from an image in an advertising mailer sent to him by The New Yorker Hotel, where he’s often stayed when visiting Manhattan. From there, Qualters embarked on a riff about a slippery subject—where do artists get their ideas?—saying, in part, “I once read something by Joan Didion. She said an idea presented itself to her mind in the form of an oil slick. And I loved that! I could understand it immediately!” 

Bob laughed a big, hearty laugh. I chuckled along, trying to remember if I’d been blessed with any mental petroleum recently. Meanwhile he resumed: “Nabokov once said, you’re walking down the street and you look across the street and somebody you know is going into or coming out of a parking garage. And suddenly, something presents itself. Then you work on it for five years. And I worked a long time on these paintings.”

Qualters reads constantly and eclectically. For years he was part of a book club comprising an A-list of Pittsburgh writers and artists. Once, when it was his turn to choose a book for the club to read, he tapped into his affection for Vladimir Nabokov and picked the author’s Pale Fire—a very bizarre unreliable-narrator novel, wherein strange tales unfold through a man’s loopy commentary on a 999-line poem. Some critics have called Pale Fire a masterpiece, some a train wreck. Just the thing to fire up a book-club discussion, right? “But the guys disagreed with me,” Bob recalled. “They said I should have picked Lolita. I said, ‘I assume everybody’s read Lolita already.’”

When interviewed, Qualters had been reading another lesser-known work by a great writer, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. He seemed to prefer it to Pride and Prejudice, which in his view has “too many pages of philosophizing.” Said Bob, “I like books in which things actually happen.” That isn’t surprising, since it matches how his life has been. 

The Making of an Artist

In the boom years after World War II, when the steel mills along the region’s Monongahela Valley were churning and burning 24/7, Bob Qualters was a teenager at Clairton High School, located on a hill above U.S. Steel’s sprawling Clairton Coke Works. There he engaged in twin pursuits of his own: trying to persuade a girlfriend to have sex, “which she would not do,” and prepping for a dream to become an artist. That turned out somewhat better. In 1951, Qualters won entry as a painting-and-design major at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), where his first midterm grades came in as “a solid D.” 

“I was a star at Clairton. At Carnegie Tech I discovered that I didn’t know shit,” he said. “Mentorship is the reason I stayed in.” Qualters’ chief mentor at Tech was Robert Lepper, the esteemed art professor who just a few years prior had nurtured a student named Andy Warhola. Lepper told young Qualters that despite his poor initial grades, “the prognosis was good.” Qualters was baffled: “I didn’t know what the word meant,” he said. “So I asked him. And a good measure of him was, he explained it to me without any condescension at all.” 

Turbulence ensued, however. Qualters broke off his studies in 1953 to serve a couple of years in the peacetime U.S. Army. Stationed in England as an anti-aircraft artilleryman, where there was nothing aloft to shoot at, he did learn train-hopping to enjoy wild times in London nightlife, and achieved his goal of earning G.I. Bill benefits to pay for further schooling. Back home, he soon headed west, seeking adventure and—ideally—a place for an aspiring young artist-to-be. 

His early returns out west were mixed. A room at the YMCA in San Francisco’s bustling-but-seedy Tenderloin district, absent a steady job, didn’t offer the most promising launchpad. But as he persisted, fortune answered. Through chance meetings and kindly references, Qualters wound up across the Bay at the California College of Arts and Crafts. More fortunate still, he was able to study there under Richard Diebenkorn—then a notably emerging artist in his own right, who eventually would become one of America’s foremost abstract painters of the 20th century. 

And that man, in the mid-to-late 1950s, was undergoing an artistic metamorphosis that would help to both shape and jump-start Qualters’ career. Diebenkorn had stepped away from abstraction for a while in order to paint figuratively. He was doing pictures of people in rooms and in landscapes, not rendered with precise realism, but in bold shapes and colors that evoked strong feelings. At a time when abstract expressionism was still the dominant style—a time when painters like Jackson Pollock (recently dead in a 1956 drunk-driving accident) were seen as the avatars of the age—this was a radical move. 

Diebenkorn, together with a group of fellow artists, formed what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. They were featured in a landmark 1957 exhibition at California’s Oakland Museum of Art. And included in the show along with them was an up-and-coming student from faraway Clairton. Says Qualters, “I couldn’t believe it. I was in peanut heaven.” 

Influences, Fistfights, and Futures

The distinctive Qualters style seems to have evolved gradually from a mixture of influences. Bob said that he has, at times, painted “a lot” like Diebenkorn. The busy-busy, social-architectural fabric of Bob’s pictures might be partly traced to his earlier studies at Carnegie Tech, which involved doing a project that Robert Lepper assigned to students—going out into Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood and documenting “the sense of the community,” as Qualters now puts it. 

Qualters also cites famous artists through history who’ve inspired him, such as Belgian painter James Ensor. During our talk, Bob raved about the Ensor fantasy “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889,” a monumental crowd scene (over 8 ft by 14 ft) now housed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. And aside from external influences, Qualters’s work reflects his drive to trust his inner self. “One day I took a canvas out to the park up the hill from my house,” he said, “and I was looking out over the Mon Valley, and I thought: I don’t give a shit what this looks like. I’m just going to do the best I can and whatever comes out will come out. I wasn’t trying to make it look like anything. And that painting won an award and got sold.” 

Strong self-will can be accompanied by stubbornness or worse. Qualters admits to having been arrogant, combative, and sometimes downright “nasty” during his early adult years—though he claims this led to only two actual fistfights (one win, one loss, as “one guy was too big and the other too small”)—and now he reflects happily on a personal journey that has mellowed him considerably. For decades he’s been regarded as an elder gentleman of the Pittsburgh arts scene, well-liked by many. He even stayed married to the same woman for 46 years; his beloved wife, Joanne Ricchi Qualters, passed away in 2010. 

The artistic journey has been rich and full as well. Bob’s art has been shown and collected extensively. He served a term as president of Associated Artists of Pittsburgh; he taught at universities ranging from SUNY-Oswego in upstate New York (where he met Joanne) to Pitt, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and finally Carnegie Mellon.  

In 2014, the University of Pittsburgh Press—with foundation backing—published a deeply researched, color-plated book by the art historian Vicky A. Clark, titled Robert Qualters: Autobiographical Mythologies. The book was released at a launch party marking Bob’s 80th birthday. Meant as a crowning coda to his career, it’s still a fascinating read. But Bob wasn’t close to finished with making art. 

One way he’s stayed vital is through collaborative experiments. Qualters has had a long working partnership with the photographer Mark Perrott, and works frequently with the digital artist Tom Underiner of Pixel River. Pieces in the retrospective show at Bellevue include contributions by them. 

And Bob was a gracious host throughout my December visit to his home. As we wrapped up, I ventured to ask about a 91-year-old’s plans for the future. Our parting exchange went as follows.

Bob, do you ever think about wanting to accomplish this or that before you die?

“No. I’ve accomplished a lot.”

I mean, do you think or feel that you have more to express? 

“Oh, yeah. I don’t think you’re ever done with that. I don’t want to ever be done.”

Deep breath by me. Then: Do you expect to have an afterlife? 

“No. But it’d be okay. I think.”

One more hearty laugh. We parted cordially. 

Info for the Exhibition

The pop-up show Robert Qualters: A Retrospective opens Saturday, January 10 from 6 to 9 p.m. and continues Sunday the 11th from 1 to 4 p.m. at the John A. Hermann Memorial Art Museum, 318 Lincoln Ave., Bellevue. The galleries are spacious rooms in an immense converted home. Admission is free; light refreshments are served on opening night, and the event promises to be a social occasion combined with an art extravaganza. 

Organized by independent curator Pat McArdle, the Qualters Retrospective is the second in a series of nine Saturday-Sunday exhibitions that McArdle has scheduled at the Hermann through the end of February. The series follows a similar run of shows done in early 2025. Upcoming exhibits this year include art from the collection of Eric Holmes (January 17 – 18), works by multidisciplinary artist Philip Rostek (January 31 – February 1), pieces by quilter and mixed-media artist Christine McCray-Bethea (February 7 – 8), and a combo show of English artists Helen Bryant and Hilary Best, February 14 – 15. 

Mike Vargo, a Pittsburgh-based writer, covers visual arts and theater for Entertainment Central.

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