"I was born with a paintbrush in my hand."
This is how artist Edith (Edie) Roberson remembers her beginning.Born in 1929 and raised in Delaware about 10 miles from the N.C. Wyeth home, Roberson always wanted to be an artist. "It was just something I had inside of me." She was never far from a crayon, pencil or paintbrush.
Initially, Roberson wanted to be an illustrator, planning the day when she could get Wyeth to take her as a student. "When I was 16 we were going to ask him . . . we didn't even know if he'd take students . . . but we were going to ask him. Unfortunately, he and a grand-son were tragically killed in a train accident."
After high school, Roberson planned on attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the oldest art school in the country. However, with the conclusion of WWII and the GI Bill, Roberson found the school flooded with returning soldiers and had to wait a year. She spent the time studying with Charles McCellend, a student of Howard Pyle.
When Roberson began at the academy, she painted every day, eventually forgetting illustration, "and I'm glad I did."
She studied for four and a half years, never receiving a degree. "In those days a degree wasn't important," she says. "Besides," she adds with a grin, "I didn't feel like taking English.
"I got married right after art school and had three kids right away, and for 20 years my art took second place."
While Roberson continued to paint, it was sporadic at best. When she could, she'd work in the morning when the children were in school, stop when they came home, and then start up again after they went to bed.
She came West in 1960 with her former husband, who worked for Hercules. It took her some time to get used to the red rocks and the mountains, but "now I wouldn't move anywhere else."
"It takes awhile living in a place to get to know the country, especially doing landscapes," Roberson says. "I find it very difficult, and most artists do. . . they have to become the landscape and to be aware of everything, really, in order to paint it well."
Roberson has included Utah landscapes in several of her now legendary trompe l'oeil pieces.
With a VW bus, she visits the canyonlands, sometimes painting on the spot. When this isn't feasible she takes photographs. "I don't like to paint from slides," she says, "but sometimes it's necessary."
In "Canyonland Tour," and other paintings, her tricycles and peddlecars fly over real places from the Canyonlands or Capitol Reef.
The subject matter in her trompe l'oeils is chosen intuitively from all kinds of objects she's collected through the years. "They come together, as if they have a life of their own, to unite in an assemblage, which will be the painting. They are like symbols in a dream . . . they tell a story."
"I see beauty in almost everything," she adds. "Not just the obvious, but also in what some might call mundane `common' objects and scenes."
Roberson collects objects wherever she goes. She once purchased a toy fish in Mexico. She kept her older brothers' "Flexible Flyer" for years; it's been in several paintings. She searches antique stores and has even rented objects she's found interesting.
"I love the old patina on furniture," she says. "I like other antiques like toys and saddles. There's sort of a history behind them. You wonder what it is."
One day, while browsing the paper, she spotted an ad for an old tricycle in Springville. The man who owned the trike said it was built in the '50s, but Roberson knew better; it was manufactured in the late 30s, early 40s, and it was all dented and rusty. She immediately fell in love with it, wondering, "What adventures did the child have?"
When Roberson paints, she strives to keep the magic of the objects alive. She doesn't put people on her tricycles, sleds, cars, etc., because she wants the viewer to participate in the painting - have them feel as if they're soaring over Rainbow Arch. "The viewer can make up their own fantasy."
Along with her meticulously rendered trompe l'oeil pieces, Roberson has an uninhibited side. "I have to be in the mood to do it," she says. "I have to be totally wild, just let it happen, cut off my thoughts and see what happens." It is during these carefree periods that she'll paint abstracts or maybe one of her "critters": garishly colored coyote-esque animals with five, seven, even nine legs. She paints these to "clean her mental palette" after the rigors of realism.
In Roberson's back yard, just steps from her studio - a veritable museum of antique dolls, soldiers, animals, cars, airplanes, stickers, wagons, ribbons, ad infinitum - she has created a pond with cascading waterfalls called "Lake Edith." Listening to the water trickle over rocks and plants on its way to the pond makes for peaceful imaginings; and as she enters her studio Roberson picks up a paintbrush and another adventure begins.
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
At Dolores Chase
"Treasures," an exhibit of recent paintings by Edie Roberson will be at the Dolores Chase Fine Art Gallery (260 S. 22 West, 328-2787) through Nov. 4.
Gallery hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday, 2-5 p.m.