Pumkin and grapes.

this is a new painting, 21cm x21cm, oil on canvas, the photo isn't as good as the original, I may re-shoot it later, if I have time, but then who ever has spare time! let me know your comments. 

Fallen Nest

This is a relatively new painting on my favourite theme.  It's a meter wide and around 700mm deep.  Oil on canvas.  I look forward to your comments.

Model turning to the right.

the following drawings measure almost a meter in hight, and are on good quality offset paper,

anyone interested in purchasing one please email me, I can post it to anywhere in the world, rolled in a tube, make me an offer! 

back view.

I forgot my own drawing materials, so I borrowed a friends charcoal, (thanks Paul.)it has a softer quality than pastel, but I like the freedom it gives and it stops me making the blacks too dark.

Celine in blue

Our new drawing group has started, we used to go to the local art school, but a new CEO wanted to change things such as, no music, and that a supervisor would be taking charge, etc, etc, so we all walked out and have now organised our own drawing group, so here are the results from last night.

Two new still life paintings.

Another couple of still life paintings.  I will be having an exhibition at the Adelaide Cathedral as part of the South Australian Living Artists Week (SALA) with three other artists.  The Cathedral is pretty big, so I must get a lot done to fill the allotted space.  If anyone is interested in making some comments, don't be shy please enter into the fun!!  And speak to me.

Chinese vase and lemons

Hi fellow Bloggers!  Sorry I haven't been very active in adding pictures recently.  Like many other artists, I'm trying to surf the Global Financial Crisis without falling off my board!  Hope you like this little picture.  It is 25 cm x 25 cm, oil on canvas.

3 Apples

Here's a new painting, oil on canvas, completed a few weeks ago, I will be posting more images up over the next day or so, watch this space, bloggers!

Arrabella

This is a portrait of my beautiful granddaughter, Arrabella.  She was in the studio, so I requested she sit on the chair next to my easel and asked her to keep as still as possible!  the process of making the painting was around half an hour.  It was at the limits of her patience!  Can you spot the difference between the two images?  I took out the heavy line under the chin and the dark line on her hair parting, and a couple of other minor adjustments.   The following day, a friend saw it and has requested I paint her grandchildren and daughter-in-law.  I'll let you know what happens (pressure!!).

Space Walk.

This painting will go in the Balmain art show, later this year, (Nov 2009.) try to get along to 

see it, along with Orbiter, one of my larger nests. 

Nest Painting

This painting will be destined to hang in an exhibition for SALA (South Australian Living Artists) at St Peters Cathedral later in the year.  

Arrangement with Protea

This painting has been sitting in the corner of my office since '04.  I liked it at the time, I still think it has some merit and I might pursue this kind of layout in some future pictures.

Quadrata - SOLD

Another new painting, the background effect was a new experiment for me.  It was almost good enough to leave as it was without the nest!  But then, Jackson Pollock has already done this!  I struggled a little bit with the weave of the canvas, it needed another coat of gesso to prime the canvas and fill in the little craters between the weave.  It's a meter by a meter.

Voyager 2. SOLD.

I sent the first painting called Voyager to an exhibition in New South Wales, the Bell Gallery.  I liked it so much I have done something similar here.  Although in real life, in detail they are very different.  I've included a beautiful little beetle that you can't pick up on this low resolution image.  

Study of a nest on a ledge. (sold)

I haven't posted anything up for a while, so I have taken the camera out and photographed a couple of new paintings.  This one has a very shiny coat of old fashioned varnish on it.  In real life, I like to see a sheen on a painting.  But of course it's hard to photograph!  This painting is about 60 cms in width, I will put a gold frame on it in a traditional manner.

Alice

A new drawing from last Thursday, I loved this pose (15 minutes) Hope you like it!

Voyager

Just completed this weekend, this could end up being one of my favorite nest paintings.  It has an almost religious feel to it, the way it floats in space.  The title is very apt and seems to suit the painting.

Time Traveler - SOLD

A new painting just over 1m x.  This will be going on exhibition soon in NSW, Australia.  The painting will be sold at around AU $2,000.00 but the beetle shown will be totally free of charge!

New - The Nest Series booklet. SOLD OUT.

To get your copy of this beautiful little booklet that features many coloured reproductions of the nest paintings, the booklet would be signed and numbered (strictly limited edition) We can post it to you anywhere in the world, simply email me at rroberts@chariot.net.au  with your postal address and number required maximum 4 per person.  The cost is AU $25.00 + postage.  Cheque, money order or paypal accepted.  

Vineyard Nest

This little painting was completed a couple of weeks ago.  It's 61 cm x 51 cms, oil on canvas.  I found the nest in one of the old vines about 50 meters from my studio, it would be nice if it was purchased by a local wine maker, we shall see!  I have no control over the destination of my paintings (first come, first served!)

John

The new term of life drawing has just started - Whoop-e-doo!

it's great to catch up with all my arty-farty friends, drink lots of wine and talk lots of bull s*@t.

Tiny Dancer

I have had this little nest for about a year, I think it's a wren's nest.  With lots of tiny fluffy grasses.  While painting this I was listening to Elton John's 'Tiny Dancer' and thought this title would suit the painting.  This painting measures 50 cm x 40 cm.

Nest on a Ledge 2

This is a new painting, completed on the weekend.  I will include this one in my new booklet.  When It's completed I will let you all know.

Reflections on the Nest Series.

An obvious question to ask about Roger Roberts’ Nest paintings is ‘what do they mean?’ I’m inclined to see them as formalist exercises, rather than as primarily symbolic or representational. That is not to say that these closely observed nests are without meaning beyond their decorative appearance. I think what most clearly distinguishes them from the merely decorative, and what shows they are not just the pastime of a bird lover, is the magnified scale of each depicted nest, and the way it is set in some larger, often much larger, abstract colour space.

So my own direction of interpreting these paintings is formalist. Once an artist has completed a work, however, he cannot expect to control the interpretations other people put on it. At the same time, these interpreters will want to feel that they have insights into the artist’s own true motivations, even if those motivations are unconscious ones. Roger tells the story of how a visitor to his exhibition suggested that the dark interior of the nest in his Nest Series #4 compels a focussing of attention and produces a mandala effect. What makes this interpretation plausible is that, according to Carl Jung’s ideas about such matters, it need not have been any part of Roger’s conscious intention—he need not even have known what a mandala is. Herbert Read, the poet and political anarchist who became one of the most influential art theorists of the twentieth century, tells of a certain “apocalyptic experience” that changed his life. Among many hundreds of children’s drawings that he had collected in his research he came across an image drawn by a five-year-old girl which she had called “Snake around the World and a Boat”. Read was deeply moved when he recognised the circular segmented image to be a mandala—the ancient symbol of psychic unity that is universally found in prehistoric and primitive art, and in all the cultures of history (1). He saw it as proof of his friend Carl Jung’s theories about archetypal imagery. The book Read wrote in 1943 in consequence of this revelation, his Education Through Art, set the course of art education in Britain and Australia in the second half of the twentieth century. The visitor who saw Roger’s nests as mandalic was not wrong, he was only showing Roger how his searching might be guided by senses he doesn’t know are within him.

Such Jungian ideas are not the ones that most immediately come to my mind when I look at Roger Roberts’ Nest paintings, but I do think there is good reason to seek out interpretations that Roger himself may not have consciously thought of. A lifetime of active looking and thinking about imagery are factors that weigh in his decision making. I am inclined to think he is more influenced by twentieth century styles of abstract art than the ornithological naturalism of his images would lead one to expect. Each new painting involves choices that are only partly directed by its subject—i.e. the contingencies of each new-found nest. The paintings range between the naturalism of a seventeenth century Dutch still life, and a kind of abstraction reminiscent of an Adolph Gottlieb. In the most extreme abstractions the background is a field of colour with no hint of cast shadow; the distance is not so much infinite as it is indeterminate. In these works, too, there is no sense of orientation; perhaps we are looking down on the nest from above, but there is really no up, down, or sideways remaining in the abstract space of the painting. In these most abstract works the format is square and the nest is centrally placed. In the still life versions the format may be rectangular, the nest may be off-centre and it is seen obliquely, casting its shadow on the field of colour. In these paintings we can the nest as having weight, and we are given a sense of the physical forces that will cause it to disintegrate. The interwoven twigs and debris of the carefully observed nests are reminiscent of the overlapping skeins of dribbled paint in a Jackson Pollock. With Roger’s paintings, however, we have the sense of the instinctive work of some earlier avian maker having worked painstakingly to generate a pattern. Roger, as a conscious and deliberative artist, can only follow, though with his own deliberated modifications and ‘improvements’. 

As Roger works his way through the changes and variations of the Nest paintings we might expect the idea to be gradually exhausted, so that some other subject, or some quite different approach, comes into his view. After a long career working as a designer meeting his clients’ demands, Roger is venturing into a career as an artist in which he has to meet the demands of his own criticism. I suspect that, as he takes his art more and more seriously, he is going to find himself facing a more demanding critic than he ever had before.  

Dr Alan Lee  

(1)  David Thistlewood, Herbert Read: Formlessness and Form (1984), p. 112.

nest on yellow.

Hi friends, and fellow bloggers!, this is my new painting for this week, I have another two on the easel that are near completion, I cant wait to finish them and post them up, I'm also in the middle of producing a little booklet with about 20 or so of my favorite nest images, it will be for sale, just to cover postage, etc, ( not to make me rich!!) more about that later.