[ music ] Birmelin: The 16th-century German painter Albrecht Durer, his friend said of him he was inwardly full of figures.

And that's what I've always aspired to, through drawing and observation, to be inwardly full of figures so that they were there to be realized visually in painting and drawing.

I'm Robert Birmelin and I am an artist.

I've been working, drawing, and painting for 75 years.

I'm in my 93rd year right now.

Narrator: Born in Newark, New Jersey, Robert Birmelin grew up in Bloomfield, where a high school art teacher encouraged him to apply to New York City's Cooper Union, which was tuition-free at the time.

He went on to get his master's at Yale, then studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London on a Fulbright grant, followed by a three-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

Later, he became a professor at Queens College in New York.

Birmelin: There are people who you meet along the way who are crucial to what you become.

Dorothea Fischer, the art teacher at Bloomfield High School, was crucial.

I never would have made that step.

Narrator: Works by Robert Birmelin are in the permanent collections of many museums, from MoMA and the Met to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

His passion for visualizing figures captured in moments remains a constant theme throughout a series of wide-ranging stylistic approaches.

Birmelin: Well, in a long career, if one doesn't go through various phases, it must be mean that you're pretty numb, right?

My work has indeed gone through a number of phases.

At one point I did quite a number of landscapes, and I discovered when I was working on these rocky shores that the configuration of the rocks suggested to me the way I could deal with complex groups of figures in space.

And that led me to working with a subject of crowds of people in the city, not only interested in the crowds as such, but the way the observer takes in a complex visual situation with differences in degrees of attention, focus, different kinds of noticing.

That was something that was a preoccupation in the paintings I did of crowds.

When I had a studio on 14th Street near 7th Avenue, they always seemed to be digging up the street.

I made some sketches of the shovel and built the painting around that.

There's this large figure, the man in the brown suit, who's very close, but, in fact, you look past him.

It's as if your attention is not fully on him.

It's looking beyond.

The whole thing is inventive -- a moment or two of noticing and the sense of looking through.

I was talking to a relative about things which had happened in our family, and I realized that our memories were very different, even when dealing with the same event, and I came on the idea of making paintings which could be seen this way, that way.

I call them reversibles.

Part of the painting which was oriented in a normal way, another part of the painting which was not.

They were irreconcilable, just the way that memory between myself and my family member was an irreconcilable memory.

Narrator: For a commissioned project at the New Jersey State House, Robert visited and quickly sketched figures all around him, resulting in the large three-panel mural called "Session Day."

Birmelin: I found it incredibly exciting.

And -- And it offered wonderful opportunities of the variety of space and movement and the way everything was happening at once.

Some elements are seen very close up, others at a distance.

I was pleased with it.

I have been doing, in the last few years, a series of scrolls inspired by Chinese and Japanese narrative scrolls, which I admire a great deal.

I found I was making paintings which were long and narrow.

I was interested in reading from side to side and the time that was involved.

In the scroll I call "Into the Woods," as the scroll moves, you all of a sudden see a person up close sort of moving through the trees.

Some of the trees are so close, drawn in such a way that you can feel the bark, as if they are within your physical reach.

Someone has fallen.

Someone is trying to help.

All seen and half seen through the tangle of trunks and branches.

As it unrolls, there is a sense of surprise.

There's a dog he seems to be chasing and another dog.

And then there's a very large hand out of scale with the figures and a combat boot.

It is a kind of flexible narrative, because you can move both ways in noticing what was happening in the work.

I set up a studio here in my house, which fortunately has very nice light.

It's an old house with good windows.

Over the last 10 years, my vision has been slowly deteriorating due to macular degeneration, and that's been the struggle I've had in the last few years, which is increasing.

I can no longer really deal with detail.

And I've had to find alternate ways of working.

I use larger sheets of paper and try to work for a broad effect, which sometimes can be different, maybe even better than when you're working with all the small details.

I do it every day.

I have to do it.

It's just in me, right?

I feel I have within myself images.

They come out of my past.

They come out of my dreams.

They come out of my imaginings.

They come out of my realities.

I want to get them out.

I want -- I want them down on paper.

And as long as I'm able to.

I feel incredibly fortunate that in my 93rd year that -- that I can do this.