Eric Roberts’ paintings share an 18”X24” acrylic-on-paper format and are executed in a bold and expressionistic style. Thematically, the paintings do not offer an easy, unencumbered path: views of the high seas with emblematic wave-tops, Martian landscapes, an incongruous empress-figure fishing off the aft of a ship; conifer trees. Taken all together, Roberts’ images hint less at narrative than outcome, a result that is less about a before-and-after than about parts that stand on their own or contribute their meaning to a greater dynamic. 

 

Roberts’ aquatic-themed “Traveling the Deep Sea”, with a sailorless XIX C. ship traveling over a field of idiosyncratic waves, is joined in the seascape category by “Empress”, depicting a single woman fishing off the rear deck of a ship, her manner bespeaking a non-monarchic state of mind. A third image, “A Picture in Nature”, pairs some evergreens with a mysterious blue and violet wall-like structure, more -ism than -ing, mystery than story. 

 

It is in the two Martian landscapes, however, that Roberts’ penchant for mystery is most evident: the red skies are predictable, but the accumulation of background shades and shapes, the freedom to invent topography not of this earth, is well taken advantage of. In “Mars 3” a tentacled shape, a sort of cross between a squid and a palm tree, juts into the sky. This is not the stuff of NASA explorations with lots of real astronomy. No amount of repurposing could take Roberts’ images outside of their underlying basis in the romantic tradition, no planned-out exercise but a revelation of the innate.

 

At the end of the road: art for its own sake. Roberts’ compositions do not spare themselves whatever is necessary, in color or design, from an outcome complete unto itself. In a time that is too full of polarization, conflict, violence, and dispiritedness, it is a gratifying to see art in the service of joy.  

​

Jim Lee

Curator / Artist / Critic