About Rodney Beecher Roberts

Discovery

My first memory of making art was more of an “incident” in the third grade. I had just finished what I thought was a rather brilliant crayon drawing of a green three-legged horse running through a field of red, purple and orange grass. Smiling, I proudly held it up for the teacher to see. She shook her head and said, “That is NOT how you draw a horse.”

In some respects that moment shaped the next six decades as I strive to live life on my own terms rather than doing what’s expected by individuals or society, but I knew I was an artist from that very early age.

As an abstract action painter, my art is less a visual depiction of places or events than an expression of moods and emotion, but it took many years of painting and sculpting before I was able to manipulate paint and materials without a conscious effort.

My first formal study of art began at The Chouinard Art Institute founded in 1921 in the Westlake district of Los Angeles. I quickly recognized that my art was being “directed” by my teachers in such as way that it was indefinable from that produced by the other students and graduates and I soon left.

Soon after I met Dick Brown, a student of Hans Hoffman who became my mentor and teacher. It was Dick Brown who introduced me to the idea of not thinking about what I was doing in the studio, but rather to let things flow and allow the painting to become art, rather than a study of line, color and composition.

As easy as this sounded at the time, in order for the subconscious to be able to manipulate the materials, I first had to learn how to control them. During the next four decades I worked full time to support my family while spending whatever free time I had developing my art.

I painted, drew, made marks and manipulated a myriad of materials on a conscious deliberate level in an attempt to recreate whatever I was seeing or envisioning in various different styles, ranging from impressionist, expressionist, cubist, and surrealist. Most of those paintings were destroyed or painted over, they were never meant to be an end in and of themselves, but rather a means to an end - the ability to paint on a subconscious rather than conscious level.

As my youngest of five children approached her teenage years I determined to focus more attention on my art. In 2000 my wife and I began the process of applying for an artist visa to the United Kingdom. At the time London was emerging as a central player and mecca for contemporary visual arts. At the age of sixty, I set up my studio and began to work full time as an artist for the first time in my life.

In 2015 family brought me back to the US and I spent 10 years in North Carolina near my daughters and grandchildren. I had a large studio, which allowed me to paint large pieces without restrictions for the first time. In 2025 my wife and I returned to Herefordshire in the UK. My work is currently available through my daughter's gallery, Beecher's, in Ross-on-Wye.

Today the visual artist no longer need rely on specific images to represent current directions and concepts. They can work from within, which is how I paint and how I hope my paintings are experienced.

All too often the term abstract is used incorrectly in the art world. The distortion of an object is not what renders it abstract in the metaphysical or transcendental sense. My figurative painting are visual memories of a place in time.

My non-figurative paintings are not intended to be abstractions from something since they have no reference to the material discernible world. Generally, they are not of something; they are something. They are what they are, an entity unto themselves.

The surface of a painting, like the surface of the tar pit, is exactly that, the surface. Beneath the bubbling tar are millions of unseen stories of creatures struggling for survival. Some creatures mistook the pool for a place to quench their thirst only to be bogged down never to escape. Others were chased by a predator into the grip of the tar, and the predator, too, may have followed its prey into the mire. Hidden within the viscous pit is a physical timeline of history.

Behind or beneath the surface of an abstract non-figurative painting there are suggestions of depth, color, movement, line, temperature and weight that can evoke memories and feelings.

It was the existence of subconsciously recognizable “openings” in my work that allow the viewer, to enter the painting and experience feelings and emotions. It isn’t my relationship to the painting that directs the viewers response, but their own subliminal relationship to things subconsciously perceived and imagined beneath and beyond the service of the painting.

So, ‘What does it mean?’ When it comes to my work, only the observer can know and then only for an instant. I want the surface to be the beginning of what you look at. What’s important is beneath, behind and under what you can see. The meaning is what you can’t see, the existential melodrama. The important thing isn’t what it means but what it makes you feel. It should be the same as looking at a sunset or rose garden. Don’t analyze it. Experience, enjoy, and let it be what it will for you for the moment. The secret to understanding art is to look. Van Gough said ‘It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.’ Creating the work has helped show me who I am and now I can only hope that it will resonate in some way with whoever takes the time to look.”

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