Clearview painter Chris Roberts takes the next step in his artistic evolution
Chris Roberts’ interest in ‘en plein air’ painting developed in earnest while he attended classes at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD) in the early 1990s.
After a series of painting sojourns to the Algoma Highlands, Roberts was invited to paint and exhibit with a group of old high school friends; together they would go on to form the collective Drawnonward. Painting with the group afforded a unique and rare opportunity to explore some of Canada’s most spectacular locations, from Newfoundland to the Queen Charlotte Islands to the Arctic. Drawnonward was often compared to the Group of Seven and became the subject of a documentary film, Seven Painters, Seven Places (Bravo/CBC).
Roberts still dabbles in traditional landscape studies but has also developed his own contemporary artistic language within a variety of media and techniques. Whether he’s carving a Canoe Lake landscape with a router into a sheet of Baltic birch or throwing paint onto a canvas to create a lifelike oversized portrait, the end result is always rooted in the exploration of the relationship between abstraction and representation. “I love the raw, chaotic patterns found in the nitty-gritty of a landscape, and how these seemingly chaotic patterns organize into esthetic form,” he says.
Today Roberts finds most of his subject matter in the forested hills of Grey-Bruce and the gorgeous pastoral landscapes of Clearview Township, where he lives with his wife and two children. For more information, visit chrisrobertsstudio.com. ❧
