By Robert Young
Laguna Beach, CA 1936-2012
A monumental underwater masterwork ten years in the making.
15 ft × 9.5 ft · 1969–1979 · Mixed media on canvas
A monumental marine painting, more than fifteen feet across and nearly a decade in the making, now seeking a permanent public home.
Begun by Robert Young in 1969, The Big One grew from a lifetime spent diving, observing, and painting the world beneath the sea.
Young painted the entire canvas six times, reworking some passages as many as twenty-five times. He estimated that the finished surface would contain more than two million individual points of color.
For approximately thirty years, the painting lived within SeaWorld San Diego and the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute. It later returned to public view at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts in 2013 and Laguna Art Museum in 2023.
Today, The Big One has been professionally preserved and remains in the care of the Young family while we seek the right permanent venue for its next chapter.
15 feet wide × 9½ feet high
Created 1969–1978
AVAILABLE FOR ACQUISITION AND PERMANENT PLACEMENT
Ten years.
More than two million DOTS.
One monumental canvas.
Created over a decade beginning in 1969, The Big One is Robert Young's monumental expression of a lifetime spent beneath the surface of the sea.
The painting survived the destruction of Young's Laguna Canyon home, spent three decades at the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, and has since been exhibited at the Festival of Arts and Laguna Art Museum. Today, the Young family is seeking a permanent home where it can once again be experienced at full scale.
AT A GLANCE
THE BIG ONE
Artist
Robert Young (1936–2012)
Begun
1969
Completed
approximately ten years later
Dimensions
15’ X 9.5 ‘
Medium
ACRYLIC
Exhibition History
Festival of Arts, Laguna Beach · 2013
Laguna Art Museum · Art & Nature · 2023
Former Installation
Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute · San Diego
Current Status
Professionally preserved and stored on an archival tube
Placement
Available for acquisition and permanent institutional/public placement
A Legacy of Ocean Reverence.
My name is Charlotte Young Massaquoi, Robert Young was my father. What I respect most about my father is that he lived his life’s purpose. Painting really was the only path for Young. I was fortunate enough to see his genius improvise and strategize across the canvas every day. Each day he’d focus in again and make a “few more moves.” He never stopped painting. Not until he couldn't anymore due to early onset dementia. We kept him in the house he and my mother built by hand together, surrounded by our personal collection of his paintings. We were there for him that long journey home and we are still there for him now. I remember the last time I saw those hands, so masterful, hold a pencil. Now I am the one making the next move.
As genius sculptor and lifelong friend, Dion Wright put it, Young’s paintings were "all stops along the same highway: well-defined, harmonious, pointillist surprises from under the sea, with a cast of thousands." I have a dream that those stops can find new homes again and again as I, now a wife and mother, have chosen, along with my mother Deborah Young, to carry his legacy forward not just for him but for my children who never had the privilege to meet him. Through YOUNG SALT — the fine art estate I founded in his name — I am preserving his passionate paintings as museum-grade archival prints for the collectors and homes that were made for them.
But every highway has a destination. And we have not yet arrived at the most significant stop of all.
The Big One, it’s the terminus of that highway — the masterwork his entire life was building toward— the reef he found in his own backyard. My father once wrote: "The sea helps to establish one's perspective and reverence for life." The Big One is the greatest expression of that reverence he left behind. Finding it a permanent home where the public can experience and delight in its fascination and wonderment is the honor my father’s legacy deserves.
The Man Who Never Came Up.
Robert Young was born in 1936 and grew up along the Southern California coast. Wright once wrote, "When Bob Young put on a diving mask back in the '40s and dove below the surface of the ocean at old El Morro, he was as transmogrified as St. Paul on the road to Damascus. In an aesthetic sense, he never came up again."
He became an Eagle Scout. A Marine. He earned his MFA from the Otis Art Institute in 1962 and returned to Laguna as soon as he could. He began exhibiting at the Festival of Arts in 1959. He helped found the Sawdust Festival in 1968, serving as its first grounds manager, deliberately un-organizing it so visitors could get pleasantly lost among art and color and possibility.
He mentored artists. He influenced a generation. He dove the Pacific, Hawaii, Mexico, and the Caribbean for forty years — came home and painted what he found there with bold color and extraordinary passion and precision.
"The vague but colorful beginnings had developed and morphed into a dense field of lost and found. Structure emerged. Inhabitants were discovered. The painter's intelligence caused entities to inhabit the reef, suddenly coming into focus the way real creatures suddenly appear in the sea."
The Making Of the big one.
In the spring of 1969, Robert Young stretched a canvas — with a broken hand.
That canvas would become The Big One.
It began, like all his paintings, horizontally — spontaneous washes, splashes, and overlapping layers of color cascading across the surface from several directions. Over time the chaos coalesced into intention. He raised it upright, supported by an overbuilt structure, whereby not only the verticals but the horizontals were made of salvaged telephone poles, constructed in the backyard of his home on Roosevelt Lane.
He covered the entire surface one dot at a time. Then he covered it again. Then again. The canvas was painted completely six times, some areas as many as twenty-five times. Robert Young wrote, "My approach, using dots and overlays, was slow and painful. But buildup of brush work would eventually give me a more symphonic color range and achieve the feeling of a coral environment. When completed, The Big One will have over two million dots." He went on to say, "The painting keeps growing. Various people say I'm overworking it. My feeling is, I'm just coming to terms with it."
the night the trees fell.
February 10, 1978. Twenty-five 90 foot eucalyptus trees came down in Laguna Canyon in a single night.
One flattened Young's car. Two fell on his house and destroyed it — miraculously leaving the family alive. The third one fell over The Big One. The telephone poles held. The painting survived.
The Big One had come to an end with a solid “kerplunk”. The storm had made a decision Young could not bring himself to make. The canvas had to be moved.
Through personal connections, the family found a home for it at SeaWorld San Diego, first in a restaurant, then in the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute when the building was converted. For thirty years it lived there, seen by few, but appreciated by all who had the privilege to experience it..
Robert Young visited it regularly. In his final years, as dementia tragically took his language when his wife Deborah brought him to see it one last time, it pulled a rare sentence from his lips:
"That was fun."
He passed away after a long 12 year decline on May 6, 2012. He was seventy-five.
COMING HOME.
A year after his death, Deborah made her decision. The Big One was coming home.
It took six people, three ladders, and a twelve-foot tube to remove it from the wall. The research institute had built their architecture around the painting over thirty years — rooms had literally grown around it. Thousands of staples were removed by hand. It took an entire day.
In the summer of 2013, The Big One was displayed publicly for the first time at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts — the same festival Robert Young began his career fifty-four years earlier. In 2023, it was exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum in the 10th annual Art and Nature exhibition.
Following its LAM exhibition, the painting was professionally dismounted, preserved, and rolled onto a large archival tube — where it waits today, in family storage, for the venue it deserves.
Dion Wright said it simply and said it best: "It ought to be in public." And then he asked the question that still has no answer:
"Who will build the venue for Laguna's most spectacular, conscious and fully realized art work?"
one last move.
May we find a final venue for this masterwork — a place where it can permanently come up for air, where people can pause, gain perspective, and feel their own reverence for life. May the legacy of his genius, his contribution, and his devotion to the ocean reach new depths.
In ballet, we end every class with a reverence — a formal gesture of respect toward the teacher, the accompanist, the fellow dancers, and the audience. It is performed with grace and dignity. It closes what cannot be left open.
Finding a permanent home for The Big One is my reverence to my father.
Dion Wright asked who would build that venue. I am asking too. Or perhaps that venue already exists— do you know where it is?
— Charlotte Young Massaquoi
Legacy Curator, Young Salt Estate of Robert Young · Laguna Beach, California
ACQUISITION & PLACEMENT INQUIRIES:
For acquisition, institutional placement, exhibition, or additional information regarding The Big One, please contact the Young family below.
Independent appraisal, provenance documentation, condition information, conservation records, installation history, and high-resolution photography are available to qualified parties.