Deborah Roberts is a native of Austin, Texas.  She developed a love for painting at an early age, and was a participant in the Gifted and Talented Program at Austin's Jocelyn High School.  Although Roberts went on to graduate from the University of Texas with a degree in fine arts, she spent two of her college years at North Texas State University.  For a brief while, Roberts considered a career in advertising and wanted the benefit of the outstanding advertising program at North Texas.  But Roberts' love for painting won out and painting is the only profession she's ever known.

Roberts continuing passion for painting has begun to garner the attention of national curators.  She has several major shows already scheduled for 2004, and she hopes to have a long and successful career as an artist.  Through March 4, 2004, a large body of work by Roberts will be on exhibit at the South Shore Cultural Center in Chicago, Illinois.  The exhibit is called "From My Perspective," and it is sponsored by the Chicago Park District.

I caught up with Roberts at the South Shore gallery the night before the public debut of her show.  We strolled through the gallery and talked at length about her work, her life and her passion for painting.  The following are highlights from our conversation.

One-on-one: Dan Perkins (dib) with Deborah Roberts (DR).  Portions of the conversation were edited for consistency and clarity. 

dib - People seem to dominate your work, why is that?

DR - Well, I think the human form is the most precious gift that we can show.  We come in all shapes and sizes, and doing figurative work is second nature to me.  I think sometimes people want us to disappear into the abstract.  What I’m trying to do is say, “Look, we’re here, we’re alive and this is how we look.”

dib - When did you develop an interest in art?

DR - In the third grade.  There was this little boy named Rudolph who was so gorgeous to me.  He was a painter and I was in love with Rudolph.  I developed a love of painting and never lost it.

dib - Were you always interested in the human form?

DR - Not always.  In the beginning, I use to paint a lot of trees and animals.  Soon after I went to the University of Texas, I started working with the human form.  They asked us to do human forms in figure drawing (class), and I just fell in love with trying to get the work to be as tight as possible.  I use to do very photo-realistic work, and then I thought about it.  If I wanted a photograph, I could take simply take a photograph.  I decided I wanted to do things that didn’t look like the ordinary person.

dib - And yet, so many of your works feature faces that are deeply expressive.

DR - Yeah, I want to get that emotion in.  In a lot of the pieces, the women’s eyes are closed.  Sometimes, when your eyes are closed, you take yourself to a different place.  So, I do a lot of faces with down cast eyes to capture the emotion of what’s going on inside the women.

dib - Do you want viewers to concern themselves with what your subjects are thinking?

DR - I want them to wonder why she’s looking down and what’s going on inside.  When you talk to people, especially when they’re telling deep stories, they tend to look down.  So, I hope people will walk up to my work and see the emotion.

dib - In addition to emotion, you also seem intrigued with light – take the Antiques Dealer for example.  Do you use light to tell stories?

DR - Oh yeah.  I love the play of light and shadows.  The Antiques Dealer features the first black antiques dealer in the state of Texas.  He’s in Austin, and he personifies everything you could want in a man who is proud of his business.  Everyday, he would pull out his wares, sit there and smoke a cigarette.  He’d watch people as they’d come down on Red River to purchase from him.  He was the king of all that, so I wanted to put him under the light.  I wanted the painting to go from shadow to light.

dib - Many of your works seem to celebrate the fullness of black women.

DR - That’s right.  Some of us are big women and culturally, we’re comfortable with that.  Madison Avenue doesn’t like fullness for white women, but look at what they did with Aunt Jemima.  We come from big people, and culturally were more comfortable with that.  There’s a real culturally specific response to the idealized female form.  A lot of Anglo women suffer from anorexia, and we have just the opposite condition.  We’re big, and say, “So, what?”  But many white women are consumed with thinness to the point that they almost die.

dib - You explore this point in your series of paintings called Sized Up.

DR - With this series of paintings, I’m saying, “Yes, this is us, and we’re comfortable with our size, but there’s a flip side to that as well.”  In one painting, a lady is trying to make her body conform to what she thinks it should be and in another painting, the lady is holding a clock on top her head.  She’s being weighted down by time and her knees are buckling.  While we come from big people, and many of us are comfortable with being large, we shouldn’t necessarily be comfortable with that.  With our largeness comes heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure – things that send us to early graves.

dib - You also have images of people in very intense moments, such as this painting with an old woman praying.

DR - This is one of my first acrylic paintings.  I was still using water color techniques because I wasn’t very comfortable with acrylic paints.  The painting is called Grace.  I was thinking about how sometimes you just need grace.  And sometimes the only thing you can do is pray.   I love to paint hands and I was just sketching and this piece came out.  I was thinking about grace, about the times when the world just beats you up.  We have a history of religion in our family.  We have more preachers in our family than just about anyone.

dib - Another powerful image is the one you titled This Land.

DR - That’s my second oil painting.  I wanted to use red in the background to symbolize the blood and sweat that we African Americans shed, and the loss of the forty acres and the mule, which we never received.  I have six different shades of red in there to show the sky, the trees, and the space.  I wanted it to frame the determined look on the man’s face, a look that say’s “we’ve worked as hard as anybody in this country.”  That face came out of one of my sketches.  I have several sketch books and all my ideas come from sketches.

dib - Your painting, entitled Why Now? depicts a rather intense and peculiar exchange between two young girls.  What’s going on there?

DR - A classmate of my niece died, and they had a memorial service at the school. This little girl – the one staring at the girl who is crying - just intrigued me.  She stared at everyone.  At first the kids in the back were playing and then everyone got serious.  Then the girl in the foreground began crying and the other girl just began staring at her.  She appeared almost angry in her response to the emotions of the other kids.  I came home and began sketching, and I tried to capture the range of emotions that were present.  My niece says the little girl is mean, but that just might have been her way of handling the loss.

dib - Your painting entitled Pride or Prejudice is another emotional piece.  You have a black man rising up out of what appears to be the Confederate Flag.

DR - Yeah.  I was watching this show where they were discussing the Confederate Flag in North Carolina.  This white guy came on and said, “They (blacks) just don’t get it.  It (the Confederate Flag) has nothing to do with prejudice; it has to do with pride.”  And I thought to myself, “No, you just don’t get it.  We don’t want to be draped with the blood and sweat of the Confederate Flag.”  So, I created this painting that has a black man rising up clean out of that water, out of that flag.  It’s my way of saying we will not be dragged back into the evil and the hate of the Confederacy.  After all, the Confederates went to war, not for pride, but for slavery, for that way of life.

dib - There’s another very expressive piece I’d like for you to talk about, it’s Matriarch.

DR - I love this piece.  This is one of the first portraits I did in acrylics.  I love Vincent Van Gogh.  I love his starry skies and all that, and I love the way he used color and showed movement.  He was a genius.  I wanted this painting to have a lot of movement and a lot of color.  In this painting, I wanted to speak to the role of black women, which in our culture has changed.  Now, in many cases, we’re the head of the family.  So, I wanted to show a proud black woman taking a break on her own land, smoking her pipe.

dib - Well, that image brings us back to our initial discussion about black women in our culture.  You clearly explore a range of topics in this show.  What do you do to prepare for a show like this?

DR - I have a studio in my house in Austin, Texas.  I get up at 5:30 every morning and paint.  I take a break at nine.  I start back at 9:30 and paint until 3:15 in the afternoon.  I take an hour break and then paint until ten.  I do that everyday, except Sunday.  I need to go to church on Sundays.  I have three major shows this year and I have to produce the work.  The ideas are there.  Waiting in Vain is the last piece I did for this show.  It’s part of the Domino series.  The texture of the ground, the movement of the sky, it’s all working.  So, I’ve got to keep it up.

dib - Before we go, let’s talk about one of my favorites, this wonderful little girl.  I believe you call the painting Robin.

DR - Yeah.  That’s my niece.  This piece has traveled to a lot of shows, and I’m now ready to let it go.  When I painted her in the water, I felt that it was the best I could paint, but I can do better now, so I can let her go.  Sometimes I hold onto a piece because I think it’s the best I can do.  And I hold onto it until I paint something better.   I believe in moving forward.  I just keep moving forward.  That’s what I do.

The End