Illustrator Gallery - Robert Goldblatt
Robert Goldblatt
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It was the lush illustration in books that cast a spell on my imagination as I was being read to in my mother’s lap, and later reading myself pressed into a nook with a big stuffed animal and a bigger stuffed imagination. Long before I saw movies in theaters, I was watching movies in my mind through books.
So when my own children were in their car booster seats crying after what had until that moment been a wonderful afternoon watching Disney’s Tarzan and eating popcorn, I asked why. They told me because the father gorilla died. Suddenly, I saw the world through a child’s eyes again, my children’s eyes. So I told them a story that helped. And that story reawoke the artist and writer I had put aside since they were born, since working at Hanna Barbara and Ruby Spears on Scooby and Scrappy Doo as a young man, I put them to bed that night and wrote and and night after night when everyone else was asleep illustrated “The Boy Who Didn’t Want To Be Sad”. Today, more than seventeen years later, that book published by Magination Press is still in print and selling in three different languages around the world.When I was looking for my first job I was sent to Hanna Barbara to interview as an artist. I accidentally got sent to the story department. I also wrote television cartoons “Scooby Doo and Scrappy” for
Hanna Barbera and Ruby Spears, and was the head writer for a television game show Bullseye. I sold the psychological thriller screenplay “Paradox” which was scheduled to be produced as a TV movie. Then I went back for my doctorate and became a clinical psychologist. I am restarting my writing career and seeing if I can find my way to the art directors as well this time.
Picture Books: I am currently creating picture books as an author/illustrator and open to illustrating work. I am also creating spec Y/A cover art realistic and surrealistic.
Novels: I am currently sending out a Y/A psychological crime thriller “The Serial Killer’s Apprentice” (Silence of the Lambs meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and “Dream Wars”, an urban fantasy novel driven by a love story that would appeal to fans of Stranger Things and Marvel movies.
My work is informed by being a clinical psychologist in West Los Angeles with expertise and deep experience in children and teens and the emotional worlds in which they reside. As well as being being a big fan of the three M’s —Marvel movies, Monty Python, and Magritte.