Robert Blenderman (1934 - 2025) was born in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne, Germany. He was gifted at drawing but attending art school was not possible; instead, he trained as a cabinetmaker like his father, uncle, and cousin.

Bob immigrated to Kingston in 1954, at age 19, and continued his trade for two years before moving to Northern Ontario for a job as a gold miner with Denison Mines. It was in the North that Bob started to paint in oil, teaching himself by reading books on technique. Missing the special connection he’d felt with the “Limestone City,” he returned in 1961 and became a founding member of Kingston Artists Workshop, while working for Dupont Canada as a textile operator.

During his long career as an artist, Bob varied his mediums and styles. His sailboat paintings in the 1960s and 1990s most clearly demonstrate this range with examples of realism, impressionism, cubism, expressionism, and semi-abstractionism. As the introduction to his 2006 book Kingston A City in Canada notes, his still lifes in oil tend to be hyper-realistic, having something of a Dutch Baroque quality mixed with a kind of orientalism. And his oil paintings of Kingston storefronts are Hopper-like in their stillness and timelessness. In all his work, he aimed to capture the essence of Kingston’s urban uniqueness and Canada’s natural beauty.

Bob’s first book, City and Country: Kingston Drawings, published in 1979 by The Whig-Standard, was a compilation of the popular pen-and-ink drawings and “doodles” the newspaper had commissioned him to do.

Cityscapes were Bob’s first and enduring love, which explains why, of all the accolades he received over the years, two of his most prized were the certificates of recognition from the Ontario Association of Architects and the St. Lawrence Valley Society of Architects.

By the early 1980s, Bob’s work had been featured in countless exhibitions, including a two-man show at Kingston Public Library’s new Wilson Room and a virtually sold-out solo watercolour show at the Brock Street Gallery. He’d been appointed a fellow of the Ottawa Society of Painters in Watercolour. Galleries across Ontario and, later, in Alberta, South Carolina, and Germany represented him.

When he wasn’t painting, Bob loved exploring Kingston’s buildings and architecture. He was often seen walking and sketching downtown or meeting friends for coffee at such places as Andrea’s, Golden Rooster, and Peter’s porch.