Painting the Soul's Movement
San Francisco Bay Area
Robin Eve Greenberg, MA, MFT, is an oil painter, Jungian psychoanalyst, and dance artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She began painting seriously in 1988, when the set designer of her dance company — Berkeley artist Ross Drago, who later became her painting teacher — encouraged her to work in oil, remarking, ”Paints don’t leave you, and you can hang your paintings on the wall.”
While drawing had always been part of her life, dance was her first and primary artistic language. Robin holds a master’s degree in dance from Mills College and a master’s in psychology, with a specialization in somatic psychology, from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a certified Jungian psychoanalyst and a training and teaching analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
Robin teaches, writes, and consults on themes that run parallel to her painting motifs: home, the intertwining of body and psyche, relationality in the process of individuation, Jewish mysticism, and active imagination. She continues to dance through contact improvisation and authentic movement.
For Robin, painting is another mode of dancing. Energy, color, and design interweave with inner feeling, and what emerges often comes as a surprise. Her style developed organically within the broad tradition of Impressionism. The painting process — much like analytic work — requires openness to the unconscious and a willingness to engage the work as it unfolds.
Robin approaches the canvas not only as an aesthetic field, but as a document of the soul’s movement.
Exhibitions & Publications
Exhibitions & Publications
Robin’s artwork has been exhibited and published primarily in Jungian and interdisciplinary contexts. Her work appears regularly in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, including a 2021 Artist Portfolio featuring her oil painting Sunflower (vol. 15, no. 1, 2021) and her paper On a Path: Painting, Dancing, and the Art of Jungian Psychoanalysis (vol. 18, no. 3, 2024, pp. 80–96), in which the accompanying paintings serve as a visual map of the individuation process. She frequently presents her paintings alongside lectures and clinical teaching at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where the work illustrates concepts such as active imagination and the transcendent function.
Collecting the Work
Collecting the Work
For many years, painting has been a nonverbal bridge to Robin’s inner life — a way of listening for meaning, beauty, and awe. Only recently has she begun offering her work for sale.
Robin accepts commissions related to her existing series and is open to creating original paintings inspired by a particular image or feeling. There is no obligation to purchase a commissioned work; if it does not resonate, it remains in her collection.
Each painting has a personal story, which Robin is glad to share upon inquiry.
Pricing Miniature canvases from $400; larger works up to $5,000. Prices do not include shipping. Most works are unframed. Local pickup in the San Francisco Bay Area is available by arrangement.
Selected Series
On a Path Series
On a Path Series
This series was first inspired more than thirty-five years ago by Camille Pissarro’s Pond at Montfoucault (1874). From the beginning, it was mysterious to me why this painting moved me so deeply. The image pulled me in — it felt like home.
The series unfolded slowly, across decades. Through the brush something astonishing opened up: the pond became a lake, became a river, a wide stream, and then its own path. Eventually I realized I was painting the creek from my childhood.
What began as an attraction to a single image became an unfolding dialogue between memory, movement, and time.
Autumn Maple Series
Autumn Maple Series
This series began as a commission, when a patron shared a photograph of a small park lined with maple trees. The image moved me, and as I worked, it opened into a series.
The gentle mound at the center of the park feels like a courtyard, an enclosed and holding form. The maples revived memories of my childhood in Westport, Connecticut, where autumn meant color, air, and a particular kind of playful aliveness.
I was drawn less to exact depiction than to atmosphere — how a place feels when memory, season, and light converge.
Tree Series
Tree Series
Trees embody opposites. To rise into the air, you must push down into the floor. Dancers know this.
I marvel at how grounded a tree is, how resilient, how majestic — and how vulnerable too, the knots and hollows and twisting scars revealing encounters with weather, fires, animals, time. In Kabbalah the roots of the tree are in the heavens, the branches descending into the earth. What is above also lives below.
I never tire of painting trees.
Sunflower Series
Sunflower Series
Sunflowers turn toward the light.
These paintings began during the early months of the pandemic, a time when orientation and vitality felt fragile. In Greek myth, the nymph Clytie follows the sun god Apollo with unwavering attention, eventually becoming the sunflower itself.
The sun has long symbolized consciousness. Looking back, I wonder whether painting sunflowers was a way of staying oriented toward awareness during a time of collective disorientation.
Flowers in a Vas Series
Flowers in a Vas Series
When I stopped performing I entered a period of disorientation. During that time, I found myself painting flowers in a vase again and again.
While I was still immersed in the image, a Jungian remarked that I might be seeking containment. The comment landed immediately. The vase holds what is alive and blooming, giving form to something that might otherwise feel too chaotic.
These are not traditional still lifes. The flowers and vase express an internal tension it felt relieving to externalize.
The Garden Patio
The Garden Patio
In this series the doors are open to the garden. I'm in a new phase, blooming in my new career. The wisteria vine weaves around the outdoor patio and blooms every spring with astonishing beauty.
Home Series
Westport & Inverness
Home Series Westport & Inverness
Home is not just a place; it's a feeling inside — of belonging, of safety, of familiarity. And also the tensions, the frustrations, the challenges. Home is evocative. As a child I walked in the woods, hung over tree branches, laid on rocks, sketched on the side of the river that snaked around the neighborhood. We return home in dreams and daydreams because the memories live in the body — in the feet, the throat, the chest. A tender moment from childhood remembered is a precious thing. Painting home is time travel.
Family — Mother & Son, Father & Son, Grandfather & Grandson
Family — Mother & Son, Father & Son, Grandfather & Grandson
I feel I was born when I gave birth to Daniel. Painting us in our different life phases is a map of my life, and his. When I paint him with my dad, it flows from my heart. Time stops. It is us, and it is an archetypal pair — mothers and sons, through eons.
Sisters Series
Sisters Series
I am blessed with two sisters — witnesses to one another's lives and close friends. Ours is a bond formed by shared history and blood, shaped by memory, devotion, and our family's history of exile and endurance.
I have painted my sisters — and myself — for decades. I return to them again and again as figures of continuity and witnessing. Siblings are an archetypal expression of being deeply accompanied.
Couples
Couples
I paint couples — pairs moving through life together, like two people in the same boat. This series comes from my own family and friends, the bonds that shape my sense of relationship. In close relationship we inevitably meet our own shadow.
Dancers
Dancers
Dance was my first language. I paint dancers as an exercise of embodiment— the architecture of body in motion. Dancers communicate nonverbally. In that sense we are all dancers.
Harold and Other Soul Animals
Harold and Other Soul Animals
Animals have always been part of my inner life. I paint horses, birds, cats, and dogs as soul beings — companions who live close to instinct, presence, and feeling. As a child I rode horses, and I still feel a deep bond with these wild yet gentle beings. Cats, to me, are the most graceful dancers in the world — pure embodiment, alertness, ease.
Harold was a very good dog. A naughty teen who grew into a wise soul. He loved retrieving the ball most of all. His eyes were full of devotion. An emotional genius. I'll miss him forever.
I paint animals who are the children of their humans. I understand the depth of that love.
Beach Series
Beach Series
The beach lies at the edge of land and sea—a liminal space where worlds meet. It is a place I returned to again and again in childhood, and throughout my life.
When I paint the beach, I think of my mother, who loved the ocean, and my father, who delighted in building sandcastles and moats. These memories carry a timeless feeling of play, care, and presence held between water and land.
And then there is my son—his delight on the shore, alongside his father, cousins, aunties, grandfather, and me. The beach becomes a living field of continuity, where generations gather, time folds, and belonging is felt through the body.
It is a place of return, where memory moves forward as well as back.
