James Roberts

medium: oils

“While the degree of my involvement has varied over the decades, I have enjoyed being engaged in making art since I was quite young. After finishing my education in Colorado, I returned to Michigan, got a teaching certificate, and began raising a family. Involvement in the arts over the next 15 years was sporadic…a few portraits, a few paintings, a few local shows. In the early 90’s I became very enamored of the landscapes in the American southwest and produced a dozen or so paintings of that subject. In 2000 I obtained a position teaching K-8 art in the Big rapids Schools and doing that for the next 4 years consumed most of my artistic energy. This was followed by 11 years of elementary classroom teaching, which consumed ALL of my energy, artistic and otherwise. After retiring I took a year to let the dust settle, but in Jan. 2016 began “full-time” painting, which means there is always something in progress, and I have completed about 3 dozen paintings in the last 3 years. Most of these have been landscapes of Scotland and Ireland, which we have had the good fortune to visit several times now. I find the starkness, the simplicity and the wildness-not to mention the skies-of these places very compelling. I hope a viewer of one of my landscapes will feel a desire to visit that place, or one like it, and a desire to preserve such places.”