A North Carolina painter and his photographer son share a love and talent for creating art that draws on an appreciation for light and detail
by Colony Little | photography by Autumn Harrison  

In the 2024 Raleigh Fine Arts Society NC Artists Exhibition at CAM Raleigh, a pair of artworks shared a special bond. One was a painting, a captivating seascape by Robert Dance that invited the eye to wander within layers of deep blue sky, foamy waves and fine sand.

Across the gallery, a framed photograph by Stuart Dance featured the legendary burger stand Char-Grill, evoking the quietude found in the dead of night on Hillsborough Street. The image’s dark, moody tones conjure an opening scene from a 1960s film noir: in the parking lot, a lone truck’s headlights illuminate two customers placing their late-night order.

The works were literally night and day, but they each expertly rendered the relationship between light and dark — the luminosity of the sun reflecting on waves, the fluorescent light glowing in the wet pavement. And it’s no coincidence that the artists share a last name: Robert, who turned 91 in May, is Stuart’s father.

Raleigh resident Stuart is the youngest of Robert’s three sons. The oldest, Scott, secretly colluded with Stuart to submit their dad’s work into the juried show. “Yeah, they surprised their father,” Robert says with a warm chuckle. “I didn’t realize Stuart had the painting, Scott snuck it to him!”

Robert, who lives in Kinston, is a realist painter with an abstract sensibility that he weaves into work focused on the mesmerizing, dynamic characteristics of nature. He began painting when he was 6 years old — he recalls that his first painting was a watercolor of an iris flower. He was born in Tokyo, Japan; his father worked as a tobacconist, which sent him all over the world to buy and sell tobacco products. As a child, painting kept Robert company throughout their family’s travels; he found early inspiration among the woodcut prints and Japanese screens in his parents’ home.

Robert’s family left Japan in 1941 in advance of World War II, then lived all over the United States (including Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, North Carolina and Florida). Robert matriculated at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, where he majored in illustration. He eventually settled in Winston-Salem to raise a family with his wife, Carolyn. The two had three sons and Robert worked as a commercial artist for book publishers, magazines and advertising agencies, developing the art for marketing campaigns for clients like General Electric, Hanes Corporation and R.J. Reynolds.

He slowly pivoted to fine art in his late 30s, and his paintings caught the attention of galleries representing prominent corporate and family collectors in Winston-Salem. In the decades since, he has earned numerous awards and recognition, including from the Smithsonian and the North Carolina Watercolor Society, and has one piece — a lively woodcut print titled As the Crow Flies — in the permanent collection at the North Carolina Museum of Art. In 1991, the NCMA Winston-Salem (formerly known as SECCA) hosted a 20-year retrospective of his work.

That same year, Carolyn passed away from an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis. In the years prior, Robert had cared for his wife, finding solace in nature, gardening and model airplanes, all motifs that found their way into his work. “I often paint the flowers and birds from my garden,” Robert says. But he might be best known for his nautical works, which express his love for boats and the ocean, an affinity he cultivated during his early years. “My father frequently traveled on ships — by the age of 5, I had been around the world maybe two or three times,” Robert recalls. “I think that by some sort of osmosis, that salt water got in my blood.”

Coastal Bands of Color, the painting shown in that 2024 exhibition at CAM, is a classic example: the piece harmonizes the sky, sea and sand through gradient shading of cerulean blue, seafoam green and pale neutrals. Its location is Atlantic Beach, where Robert’s second wife, Coleman, an artist and jewelry designer, has a home. On the seashore, a lone fisherman casts a line over the rolling waves as gulls fly in the distance. During the opening ceremony last September, Robert sat watching visitors study the works in the exhibition. “I noticed that a lot of people would look at my painting, then they’d come back again to see little details, like Laughing gulls or Great Black Backed gulls,” he says. “They couldn’t believe that somebody actually sat down and painted something like that.”

For Robert, painting requires discipline and an affinity for problem solving. He spends up to eight hours each day in his studio and can take up to six months to complete a painting. “You have to be extremely interested in what you have picked out to paint,” Robert says. “I work in such detail trying to solve problems of reflected light and sunlight.” He frequently incorporates a technique called glazing using alkyd, an oil-based paint that dries faster than traditional oils. “I will often use up to 20 glazes for sky or water to get the feeling of depth, because light penetrates and bounces off these glazes to produce reflections, like a window in a church,” he says. “Some of the best artists, such as Vermeer, my absolute favorite, used that technique.”

His photographer son Stuart uses a similar exacting process and appreciation for slow looking and stillness when he clicks the shutter.  He recalls being drawn to cameras from an early age, surrounded by creatives in the Dance household (the middle brother, Mark, is also an accomplished artist; he lives out of state). “I grew up with a darkroom in the house because my dad would photograph studies for paintings when we’d go on trips,” he says. “He would come back and develop his own film — that made an early impression on me.” Stuart has an aptitude for image manipulation and experimentation; as a child he’d pour chemicals on family photos to see how the picture corroded and morphed through its reaction. From his love for photography, Stuart began collecting rare cameras; he now owns over 350 of them, with the oldest dating back to 1897.

This eye for experimentation and collecting also extends to an interest in music and working as a sound engineer. “When I was 10, my father accidentally bought me a drum machine instead of a metronome; it was over at that point,” he says. “I started collecting analog synthesizers and samplers, ordering modular synthesizer kits, and building a Theremin.” Stuart studied design and production at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, culminating his interests into sound design. After graduating he began touring with dance companies and moved to New York City, working for on- and off-Broadway productions, including Rent in the early 2000s.

During his years living in New York, Stuart struggled with mental health, addiction and self-harm, which ultimately necessitated his return to North Carolina. “I crash-landed in Raleigh after a long period of self-destruction,” he says. “I had been drinking too much and burned out — I literally drank everything away.” Stuart lapsed into homelessness between rehabilitation treatments and periods in crisis, but during this time he returned to photography as a source of healing. “It was always an escape for me and brought me back to center,” he says. “It slowed down my mind and gave me perspective on life.” Stuart would walk around Raleigh in the middle of the night, just taking pictures. “I was depressed, not really knowing what was going to happen, not having anything, but somehow I always had a camera… it reminded me of who I was,” he says.

Dorothea Dix Park became a haven for Stuart; he often visited the grounds at night, shooting images of the abandoned buildings that once housed the Dorothea Dix psychiatric hospital. “Hearing all the stories about what happened there, I thought it was important to go through and take pictures of it,” he says. He’s built a body of work with the aim of preserving some of that history as Dix Park continues to evolve. “It’s interesting how something like mental health could have a stigma to it, then be reimagined. I think there’s a parallel to the human condition — we have to reimagine how we see it,” he says. He particularly enjoyed visiting the park before recent efforts to clean it up and make it a public park: “It felt very dilapidated and dangerous; I could imagine being behind some of these fences on the other side. I felt a connection to it.”

Throughout his recovery, Stuart returned to sound engineering for select projects, and he is now focusing on developing his photography portfolio. “I take pictures of things that people pass by every day without looking twice, but seeing places with a child’s eye is fascinating; it makes life exciting again,” he says. Stuart recently started a project with his partner Autumn Harrison (who is also a photographer) called Aperture + Atlas, and over the past year they’ve traveled the East Coast photographing various points of interest, sharing the images and the lessons he’s learned through his travel with his father. “My father’s somebody who’s like-minded,” says Stuart. “He grew up traveling all over a different world, so talking with him about art and photography has given me a lot of direction.”

Discipline guides Stuart’s work; that’s also a practice he shares with his father. “My father once said there’s a lot of enthusiasm masquerading as art — anyone can create something beautiful, but making art is learning about yourself while you are learning how to create,” he says. “My father has shown me that a career in art can only be maintained by discipline, and in that discipline is love.” Robert is effusive with praise for his sons, always at the ready to detail their respective accomplishments. Stuart’s photography, he notes, was recently included in the 2025 print issue of the North Carolina Literary Review. “My best friends are my three sons,” he says, “like the TV show!”

While Stuart is on the front end of a career as a photographer, Robert does not consider himself ready to wind down. He cites a quote by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai as inspiration: “…until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. At 73 years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. Thus when I reach 80 years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at 90 to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at 100 years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at 110, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.” Robert’s fastidiously working on his submission for consideration in the next Raleigh Fine Arts Society NC Artists Exhibition, and he believes that his best work is still in front of him.  

This article originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.