“Nothing Ever Goes Unseen”

Artist John Roberts taps into generational history and supernatural encounters in his first solo show, now on display at David Lusk Gallery.

by

“I’m sitting here in the yard right now, and I feel like someone’s watching me from the window upstairs,” John Roberts tells me over the phone. He’s at his family farm in Weakley County, Tennessee, where his distant grandmother purchased the land in 1838 and where back in 1921 his great-grandfather built the house he now lives in. “There’s just so much history here,” Roberts says.

History, of course, is inescapable. Its residue lingers in the bones of our homes, in the fabric of the communities built by generations before us — generations whose traumas inform our DNA, whose legends inform our identities. For Roberts, that history sometimes takes on supernatural manifestations, an idea that he explores in his first solo show: “Nothing Ever Goes Unseen.”

“He was coming home from church up the road one night and saw a ball of white floating across the field, and it came across the road and turned into a woman in a white dress walking across the road and spooked his horses. That’s just right up the street here, the road from my house.” — John Roberts

In this series of paintings and drawings, various figures from the generations before him stare directly at the viewer without shame or menace, sometimes through a window, other times from around the corner of the house, but always surrounded by a “warm and inviting” color palette. “I draw from the place I live, this rural, kind of lonely way that’s been in our family for generations,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be creepy. I like to think about what comes next after this life. I like to think we’ll be reunited.

“I guess, my faith has a lot to do with it, too; I’m Catholic. And I think these people are just waiting around for me. ... I’ll be out mowing the yard and I’ll think about things like ‘Is there somebody in the window?’ or I think I see somebody peering around the corner of the house. ... It’s a comfort for me to see these people, to paint them. And it’s kind of like an act of prayer for me because Catholics pray for the dead.”

“Thinking about them gets me a little choked up,” he adds. “My great-great-grandma looking out for me — those things are outside of time now, and I’ll be there, too, some time.”

Indeed, the artist spends a lot of time contemplating mortality, having been a tombstone etcher for more than 20 years, a job he got right out of grad school and still works to this day. Soon after starting this job, though, Roberts, a father of eight, became consumed by his responsibilities in work and in his family and couldn’t make time to paint until a year and a half ago. Though he admits that his work as an etcher has helped improve his skills as an artist, Roberts says, “It’s been frustrating because I felt like I haven’t been able to express myself. ... The whole time I really longed to be making art, but I had so many things going on.”

Yet, he adds, those “things going on” — making music, being there for his family, working with an orphanage in India — have empowered him with the lived experiences to express the generational memories and warmth that his paintings aim to convey. As such, to Roberts, those 20 or so years of not painting were not a loss but a time of artistic enrichment.

When he paints, he starts with an idea, usually related to his own supernatural encounters or supernatural stories passed down through generations. For instance, the drawing titled The Lady in White Returns to the Woods, Roberts says, “is actually based on a story that my great-uncle always told, and [recently] I was talking to a man — he’s 87 — and I asked him about it. And he says, ‘Everybody knows about that.’ He was coming home from church up the road one night and saw a ball of white floating across the field, and it came across the road and turned into a woman in a white dress walking across the road and spooked his horses. That’s just right up the street here, the road from my house.

“And then she came back another time, in our house here, and the guy I work for — my cousin — he was a kid in the ’60s and she came back in his bedroom while he was sleeping.”

In Roberts’ black-and-white drawing, the Lady in White appears to be a part of the landscape, not the central focus but a figure in harmony with the still and quiet world the artist has created through delicate linework and through the balanced composition that keeps the eye moving from detail to detail.

“I want to keep the viewer’s gaze within the frame of the picture,” Roberts explains. “To me, it’s like a math problem I have to solve. It’s a challenge, and it can be really frustrating. And I'll stop sometimes for days and just stare at it until I finally figure out what the issue is, so when I finally finish a painting it’s a huge relief.”

Oftentimes, these finishing touches include a memento mori, sometimes evoked in the form of an animal. In the drawing with the Lady in White, a dog appears in the corner with its chain broken. “It sets the tone,” Roberts says. “I’ll sometimes put a cat with a mouse in its mouth, as a sign of ‘beware’ or a little bit of the off-setting nature of what I want to establish if there’s an apparition in the painting.”

Plus, Roberts admits, “I just love cats. It’s just an excuse for me to paint cats.” As such, for Roberts, painting and drawing is a joyful act, a stimulating release, and an outlet for gratitude. Throughout his creative process, the artist says, “I like to think about the past and what a good life I've had. We’ve had so many hard times, but we’ve had so many good times, too.” And now at 48, after starving 20 years for an artistic project to express these feelings, having the time to paint has been “revolutionary,” he says. “I can’t imagine not having that outlet now. I’ve taken a few days off since my show, and I don't know what to do with myself.”

“Nothing Ever Goes Unseen” is on display at David Lusk Gallery through July 31st. View the virtual tour of the exhibition on the gallery’s Instagram (@davidluskgallery), and follow John Roberts on Instagram (@johnwroberts.art).