Encaustic Energy: Dale Roberts

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me Portland Art Gallery artist Dale Roberts. Thanks for joining us today.

Dale Roberts: You're welcome. Nice to be here.

Lisa Belisle: I always enjoy having conversations with people who have their art right behind them because it gives me something fun to look at and also gives me a way to start the conversation out. Tell me about the pieces that you have right behind you in your house.

Dale Roberts: Yes, very good. Well, these two pieces were both arrived at in a very different way. The still life with the dried flowers was actually a group effort. On occasion I'll invite folks to the home and we'll have a painting party in the studio. So I heated up the wax and I had a still life there for folks to look at, but I had people who had no previous experience at all, and they were rather terrified of the idea of painting. So I showed them essentially how to put it on and then just told 'em, you go have at it. And so they did, and they had at it. And at the end of the time there was a lot of paint on there, some of which was useful, in fact, more than you might think.

And that became my mission, to edit out what wasn't and make use of what was. So I called the painting Good Company because it was a result of a night of fun interaction and painting, and then me editing what was there. The one next to it is called Corrosion and Light. I do a lot of running for a lot of reasons. I have two sons and it used to be just to keep up with them. I've always loved to run. So this was along a pathway on my way home from a day job I had for a long time. And I found the light just beautiful on this one November evening. So after I'd gone home and showered and changed, I drove back out there and made some drawings and took some notes.

And then I visited that spot probably over the course of the painting eight or nine times, either making detailed drawings or taking notes or doing gouache color studies. And then I brought those back to the studio. Photographic references involved too, to help with some details. But essentially it's from those sensations I get from life. I'm keenly aware of both the tyranny and the limitations of the camera. So I can make use of it as a tool. And anyway, this painting took months to do. It is encaustic start to finish. It might be surprising to know that I do very little drawing on the panel ahead of time. Pretty much just start putting in big washes of color and then developing the painting gradually, so it goes from general to specific. So in a nutshell that's how these paintings were arrived at. A last anecdote on the large landscape: I tend to draw and paint in areas that not everybody will go to. They're not your typical picturesque spots. And I run into a lot of different sorts of folks when I'm doing that. And in this case was no different. People feel unthreatened, so they'll just strike up a conversation with me and it's really interesting to hear what folks have to say.

Lisa Belisle: Well, play that out a little bit for me. What did you encounter in your conversation when you were working on this piece?

Dale Roberts: Well, I have a lot of folks that would talk to me about their earlier experiences with art. And many of them who stop will say, I used to love to draw and paint, or, I've always loved to do this, but I don't do it anymore. Others will say things like, why are you painting that? Because they'll look at it and think there's nothing there. But usually as I develop the drawing or the color study, they can see what I'm after and then I can talk to them about it. And I'll just say, it's the way the light transforms what's out in front of us. And it's often seeing an everyday sort of backdrop that we haven't even noticed. So you can have those kind of conversations with people. They want to know lots of particular things, what are you gonna do with this?

Where does it go from here? And that sort of stuff. One case in particular that was rather interesting, I was drawing a bridge in Philadelphia and I had a pretty good detailed drawing already underway, and I had noticed someone on a bicycle going across the top of the bridge. And I was there long enough that pretty soon I hear a voice behind me. And this person says, well, what are you doing? And I had turned around and looked and I said, I'm making a drawing. He said, I can see that. Well, he was a police officer. And he said, what's this drawing for? And I said, well, it's for a show that I'm going to have, and it's gonna be a large painting that I'm currently working on at home. Well, then he wants to see ID, he wants to see photographs of the thing.

He wants to know where the gallery is, which happened to be right around the corner. Pretty soon a black and white police car stops. And this gentleman gets out, great big police officer, and he comes over, well, what's going on here? And I thought, oh gosh, and same sort of thing. And then he looks at the drawing and he says, if this drawing wasn't so good, we'd have to haul you in. Well, as you can imagine, it had to do with some issues that go on, bombings and stuff like that. They probably are wondering if I was making a diagram where it'd be a nice little spot to plan my attack. So the stuff that happens, you just can't account for it. It just all of a sudden happens. And there you go.

Lisa Belisle: So it's interesting that in both of the pieces behind you, you're describing an interaction with the world. So you've captured a still effect of really an entire scenario that took place over hours in one case, and it sounds like months in the other, and it sounds like this happens to you on a regular basis, that you're not just interacting with the light and the scene. You may also be interacting with people.

Dale Roberts: You know, that's a very good observation. Yes. And I think that also points out some of the limitations of the photograph. If I just whiz by and see something and I like it, take a picture, come home and work from it, I miss out on all of that other stuff. And it's very soon of you to pick that out, because it's those interactions that can give fuel to the why of what goes on in painting. It's not simply about how, and for me, why is probably what's been the driving force for keeping this alive for 40 plus years. And I can see it keeping me going for another 30 or 40 years. So it's just one of those consuming things that makes painting absolutely vital and interesting.

Lisa Belisle: Now, my understanding from reading a conversation that we had with you for a different piece of profile in a different media is that you have more of a farm background. You're not really coming from an art situation.

Dale Roberts: Yes, that's a good thing to talk about as well. I grew up in upstate New York, about the geographic center of the state where winters are real and snow amounts are heavy. And I often joke that that's probably why I'm able to slog through paintings like this, because I'm determined. You grow up in upstate New York in a farm background and you become determined or you don't survive. And so, I would say that I probably spent 80% of my childhood outside either fishing or building forts or drawing and painting. I started doing that at a pretty young age, certainly started drawing at age five, six and drawing all the time, soon graduated to watercolor painting, and just went out and worked. There wasn't a lot of formal training and I had some experiences with a watercolor artist who was actually trained in the Philadelphia area who lives in upstate, or did live in upstate New York.

His name was Ralph Murray, and he was a wonderful man and a great encourager. So I had some of that, but to be honest with you, I had no clue that you could be an artist and make that work for your life. It just wasn't surrounded with folks who thought that way or did those things. My dad was a carpenter and I grew up doing carpentry work and house painting and all those things you do to manage. And yet I love to read and I still do. And it became evident that I would probably be moving away and doing the school thing. So even the beginnings of that were rather unplanned at best. I didn't have any money, so I thought, I'm not gonna go to school, figured I would join perhaps the service.

And due to the efforts of a librarian at our school who was a pretty observant woman, she said, no, you need to go to school. So I ended up applying to two schools because they said I can't afford to apply anywhere else. Took the SAT once because I was resentful I had to pay for a test, and ended up at RIT, which was a very expensive school, ironically. But I got grants and scholarships and work study, and so there we go. But the rural background, I think, has a lot to do with my appreciation for light. And when I moved down here to the city area, I was always searching for something that was a little more like home. So Valley Forge, Lancaster, those areas were that breath of fresh air. But then I also found that the interaction between the natural world, light, and man-made structures really was very interesting to me. And so that became an easy transition for me to do that.

Lisa Belisle: I noticed in looking through some of your pieces on the Portland Art Gallery website that you explore locations that are outside of where you live. You have several from Europe, I think one I saw was Prague. Is this the same sort of idea, that trying to find life within an urban setting at times?

Dale Roberts: Yes. I think first of all, it's been a wonderful thing to be able to travel. We're speaking with somebody about it all last night, and we decided that the age that magically opened the door for us was around 45. Somehow at that point, the resources were there, the kids were old enough, we were able to do that. And so I had always wanted to travel and had never done it before. So my wife Lisa is a wonderful travel guide. She could be her own travel agent. She's a meticulous researcher and manages to find these places that are not only beautiful but historic, and she knows me so well and knows what I'm interested in doing, that she will find places and throw them out to me that I know will pique my interest.

And so we've had opportunity to do that. And I would say I do bring similar notions to Europe and to places that we visit. I had an opportunity to be an artist in residence in Tetouan, Morocco for five weeks. And Lisa came with me, which was an unusual pairing. Often in an artist in residence, they don't really want the spouse along because typically it's, well, when are you gonna be done painting? Rather go do something else. Well, very often Lisa will read poetry to me in the studio, or other books, and when she does, she'll assume the characters and read them. So our relationship is very different, and she knows what I'm after. She's always been a huge support. So she came along as well and really enriched the entire experience for everyone, which was really a neat thing.

But back to how that relates to the work I do here, it's the same sorts of issues that are at play. But the other thing is I'm acutely aware of the age of the things that I'm painting. Very often they're ancient, and the things that we consider new here, they're considering as though it's just a motion in the wind. It just isn't permanent. A 200 year old place is like an addition, a new addition on their house. So I find that fascinating. I find entropy and the effects of time to be fascinating, to try to capture ideas of corrosion, whether that's from metal or just from weathering, repurposing, history written on a wall. That stuff to me is just fascinating. So it doesn't matter where I am, the stories have similarities, and yet they have their differences, and it's the differences that are so intriguing to notice and they expand my approaches and how I paint.

Lisa Belisle: Encaustic as a medium is actually quite ancient.

Dale Roberts: Yes, yes. That's one of the things that attracted me. At RIT, I started getting interested in egg tempera, and so they put me in a graduate program as a sophomore. So I jumped into studying egg tempera, which was pretty much on my own. And true to form, when I finished up at Tyler, I thought, well, I'm gonna investigate encaustic. I've heard about it. I thought it would be interesting. And so I went for it. And for me, the permanence and the craftsmanship has always been a deal. Guess, growing up in the farming and carpentry community, the idea of doing things right was simultaneously doing them well. And so doing a painting right means that it be crafted well so that it will be there for future artists to learn from, to perhaps enjoy, and for other folks to be able to live with.

My thinking is we owe that to the masters that came before us because they operated that way. If they didn't, I wouldn't have been able to go look at Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp that was done 400 some years ago. And I can learn from it, and I can truly enjoy it. And I also love watching other people enjoy it. Sometimes that's the biggest fun. So the ancient piece, I think, is a nice kind of a touchstone, how to get there in those older subjects, those older places. Seems like it fits well. Yes.

Lisa Belisle: So the juxtaposition that you're describing, of a sense of more permanence and rootedness, but also a sense of temporality, is really pretty fascinating, because you began our conversation talking about interplay of light, which obviously is something that changes over the course of a day and a season and a year. And now you're talking about things that have been in existence, or a legacy that has been around for hundreds of years. In your mind, is it the conversation between those two that creates the joy of the art that you work on?

Dale Roberts: You know, that's a great observation. I would say it does. And I would say that for me, the ability to turn the dial just a little bit either way can make for a vastly different experience on the work. The emphasis of what I do, if I want it to be more about that sort of wearing away of entropy, I can do that with paint. I can blast it with a heat source and watch it disintegrate before my eyes, or melt and do things. As you notice, I paint definitely in a realistic manner. And yet there's a lot of abstraction going on underneath that, in concert with that. So the willingness to destroy gigantic sections of a painting, or sometimes the whole thing, and then bring it back is something that relates to that, that sort of uncomfortable tension there between the things that are more lasting and the things that are so temporal.

I think that's just a fascinating dialogue. I think our culture's in the midst of that dialogue anyway. And if you look back at ancient cultures, they dealt with that. I remember seeing some of the crypt paintings and stuff that were done, the temporal nature of the tomb here, but then the eternal nature of looking on, and found that to be a fascinating and rich area to consider even in my own stuff. Why make something that's gonna lapse, why make something at all that's meant to be looked at and put up on the wall? So it gets to those deeper questions. And I think that that's a great observation. It's the kind of observation I hope people will make when they look at work and then engage in a conversation about it. To me, again, that takes it into an area that's way outside of the immediate reference and into something more of a dialogue. And that is how I approach my paintings from life.

Lisa Belisle: You mentioned that you like to run, and I believe you're a distance runner and you run distances several times a week, and I think you and I share that love. One of the things I love about running is that it is on a regular basis being part of a changeable environment. So as I'm running today and we've just gotten out of a series of rainy days, the ground is moist, all the leaves are starting to come out and the birds are happy, and it's so different than it was a couple days ago. And I love not only seeing what changes where I am and where I normally run, but also when I go somewhere else and run in a space I've never been before, because I feel like it's a kind of a full body exchange with the environment. And I wonder if you also, when you travel, have a similar experience?

Dale Roberts: Yes. I think the running is also a great metaphor for that. Very often, and I run regularly, I'll run, and sometimes I find myself solving visual problems while I'm running. For a time I ran with the earbuds in, the whole bit, and I haven't done that now for a couple of years. I didn't used to do it, and it's too much a pain in the neck anyway, and I miss all those things you're describing. I recall vividly and fondly in the fall when you start to hear those dry insects out there making their last sounds, crickets and things, and that rustle and the wind through the corn when you're running in a country place. So those are things that truly do inform.

And I think that being in different environments, it really does spark other ideas. I've often said that I think artists are noticers. We notice stuff and then we store it and bring it back. And sometimes those experiences of being out in the environment and enjoying all those different sensations, they come back and they inform your choices. And I think a big part of being successful, certainly for me, at implementing those things is to write them down. I might come back from a run and just jot down a few notes about what I experienced, and I've got Post-its everywhere, and lately they've even become part of my still life paintings. They're there and they can sometimes just be a little reminder of this thing. Maybe just the word about the light, it was pearly today, so what do I do to get pearly and how did that make me feel?

And would it work with this particular image that I'm struggling with or working through? So those sorts of things. And like the running in the moisture, I ran yesterday and here it was that sort of dodge that you're playing with the weather and your phone app and you're saying, oh, well, it's supposed to rain for the next hour. Okay, I'll have a light lunch and I can run in an hour. Did all that, went out to run, big storm in the middle of my run, it's like, okay, well, I'm wet now. That's fine. Which is still fine. There's a different, as you know, it's more of a closed in sensation when you're running in the rain, you're trying to manage that and run through it. It's a different experience altogether. So I think being open to those other sorts of stimuli that can inform your stuff and your thinking is a good thing.

Lisa Belisle: And of course, there's the discomfort. We're describing moments that maybe we can think of as joyful, but running in the rain isn't always great. But when you put yourself out there, even that experience of, as you describe, moisture, even that can inform, I think, the way that we live.

Dale Roberts: Yes, I think so. And when I paint, there's moments when I'll be pushing around significant quantities of paint. I might use a spackle blade and just kind of heat something up, push it around for a while, and that's not unlike running through a muddy hillside. I did a Tough Mudder a few years back, and that was a blast, and interesting to kind of push yourself to some different sorts of limits. And I think painting does that as well. It pushes me to different visual limits, to limits of my patience, of my stamina. I'm working on a large thing, and yet when you're pushed to limits, then you achieve things that you didn't expect. And I think that's definitely a great metaphor for that kind of dialogue that I have with painting too. Yes.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea of where we are all emerging from in the past few years, and how we've, by necessity, protected ourselves, drawn back, worn masks, stayed home. And even the fact that COVID has had an impact on our sense of smell, so it directly impacted some people's actual physical ability to sense something. And it's almost the emerging back out into this world where all of a sudden we're all feeling like baby birds, like the light is too bright, the smells smell too much, the people are too loud. And I wonder if it isn't that mutual emergence that's causing us all to just feel, besides being tired, but also just trying to get used to actually interfacing with the world in a more normal way again. Have you had that experience?

Dale Roberts: Yes, I think that's a great conclusion to draw, or an observation perhaps to lead to conclusions, because I remember we were actually setting up a show for my mentor who had passed, and he had left me his paintings. So we had put together this retrospective show of his work, and he's from Ohio and was out in the Chagrin Falls area of Ohio, and that was May 12th of that year. And we got the announcement when we were out there that something's happening, and so we drive back and things are shutting down as we're driving back. And then of course, as you know, we had the gradual implosion of everything and the discovering of these things and those things and the new limitations and how they went. And along the way, I remember my wife and I both contracted COVID early, like, I think it was June of that year.

And we'd been as careful as we could be. And of course the usual question was, well, how'd you get it? And I'm a little bit of a wise guy, and I said, I really love licking doorknobs. So I went around and did that. I said, I don't know how I got it, it's a virus. I could tell you that we were doing all the grocery shopping for my in-laws, and it's very likely that would be the place because there's just so many factors. At any rate, it affected our sense of smell. My wife's more acutely, and she found an interesting way to cope with it. She decided, as she was starting to recover, that she'd play those scents, those things that are like essential oils, and she would pick out a scent that she recognized, like cinnamon, put it in there and retrain her nasal passages to get it.

And so I just thought that was really a smart approach. I'm a little more stubborn and just go ahead and plow through and get it done. For me, and for her, it was more between a cold and the flu. In fact, the day that she tested positive, I decided I needed to go out for a five mile run. And I did that. And then I tested positive the next day. I said, well. And as far as the emerging idea, I do think it's really caused us to reflect, and perhaps in some ways over reflect. I don't think we're designed to be like this all the time. And when we are like that for a protracted amount of time, I think there's a lot of things that can gain purchase in our minds that maybe wouldn't normally.

And we've certainly found that. And as you come out of that, there's this sense of goodness, of relief. Like, wow, we just got back from a trip to Amsterdam and it was just glorious and lovely, and to be able to be out there and to be able to be on a plane for that long without having to wear a mask if you choose not to, there were a lot of freedoms that are so easy to take for granted. So for me, during the lockdown, we did a lot of inside stuff. We have a nice backyard garden. We spent tons of time out there, had more wine than we needed. We spent a lot of time working on the house and projects. And it's just so interesting how your focus shifts.

I found there was a lot more interest in art because I think people were looking at their bare walls and thinking about what could go there, where before life just runs at this frantic pace. I would say one of the real benefits of the lockdown would be that it did cause people to have to slow down. It just necessitated that you had to be deliberate. You had to really make your choices and think about them. And I think it points out the sort of breakneck pace that we're often at and hesitant to get back to that. I'm a busy man. I get up quite early. I'm working hard most of the day, but I am quite willing to stop and spend those moments being more quiet. And I think the emergence is a great thought there. I think a lot of my images sort of emerge. They don't just get put down and then filled in. I don't make colored drawings, they just come out of what's going on with the paint. So, yes.

Lisa Belisle: Dale, you're obviously joining us from another part of the country and I'm here in Maine. What is your connection to Maine and to the Portland Art Gallery?

Dale Roberts: So when I was young, I remember hearing about Maine, and my grandparents had a camp in the Adirondack mountains. And I loved that sort of northern kind of environment. There's just something about the landscape that I absolutely loved, and I remember hearing about Maine and I remember thinking, oh, that sounds like a great place. And we just didn't travel. We didn't have the funds to travel. I had not been out of the state until I was a senior in high school. So we finally got out of the state and the first thing we did was dad took us through the northeast, and we went from Vermont into Maine, and we dropped down. So that was my first exposure to Maine. And I remember thinking, oh, I need to get back there. So, let's see, my first year at RIT the summertime was spent house painting, trying to make dollars to go back to school.

And my best friend from high school, who currently works for the State Department, has for a long, long time, he was my partner in crime doing the house painting. So we decided we're gonna take a bicycle trip, and it was gonna go from Bennington, Vermont to Ogunquit, Maine, and we're gonna work all summer to get ourselves ready for this trip. We're gonna ride our bikes around town to get ready. I mean, the delusions you tell yourself when you're young, thinking that's gonna be enough. We did all that. And then the day came and we took our bikes apart because we reasoned that we didn't wanna spend all of our time riding out of familiar areas. We were gonna take our bikes apart, put 'em on a bus, and go to Bennington, Vermont, and then put 'em together and then get on the bikes and ride.

So I had a bike called a Vista with some very inexpensive panniers on it. And I think my total weight of bike and equipment was about 70 pounds. It was way, way, way heavy. We were just novices. So ironically, we get out of our place at the bus depot, we start to travel and big smiles on our faces, we're gonna head out. And this gentleman comes down on the other side of this big hill, all paired down on one of those really stripped down economical bikes. And he had on a banner that said Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. So he was making that bike trip, and he took one look at us and just sort of shook his head. And I thought, oh, well. So we take off and big smiles, we go up and first thing we hit is something called Hogback Mountain.

And we're just like, it seemed like miles and miles up this windy mountain. We were so exhausted. We camped out at the top and spent the next morning going down to Brattleboro down this steep hill worrying about being able to stop, it was a little bit damp. And then we made our way to Ogunquit. The hard part was we only allowed ourselves three days to make that trip. And so the middle day was going through New Hampshire and, goodness, we put on a hundred miles and it was miserable. It was like 50 and raining, and gosh, that was hard. But we got to Maine and we saw the ocean and we just threw our bikes and we just ran into the surf. So then, my first connection, my wife and I did some after-honeymoon camping up there near Harraseeket, and just loved it.

And I've been up there several times since. My younger son, Josh, is an oboe player. He was a conservatory level oboe player, and he used to study up there near the Belgrade Lakes. So we made treks up there. There was a New England Music Camp, welcome anytime to go to Maine. Had been to Monhegan Island and done some painting there. So I've had a significant connection with Maine, which is always a delight, and I love the climate. Let's face it, Philadelphia in the summer, forget it. I'll take Maine any day.

Lisa Belisle: Having a child that is graduated now from a college in upstate New York, and having traveled there and also having seen her experience with the snows and the colds, it seems like at least you moved south to a place that maybe doesn't have quite as much snow and quite as much cold. But it's nice that you still have that connection to Maine because it is a pretty wonderful place.

Dale Roberts: I do. So yes, it is. And there's a kind of ruggedness that I really enjoy about it. The coast is different. The Jersey shore here for the most part, at least where we go, Ocean City and stuff, I kind of view it as like a strip mall of sand. It just doesn't have the topography that you have up in Maine. In Maine, you get those wonderful boulders and the different kinds of sand and these tidal pools. And I do have a gallery that I show with in Cape Cod, and it's similar. I'll spend just hours with my feet in a tidal pool and making drawings and paintings of what I'm looking at. And I recall doing something similar up in Monhegan, sitting in this sort of basin of rock, making this painting that was almost like an organic tapestry of what I was looking at, these different kinds of vegetation and stuff. And to me, that variety that Maine has, I just think it, is it the granite state, or is that New Hampshire?

Lisa Belisle: We are the pine tree, we're the pine tree state. New Hampshire is granite.

Dale Roberts: That's granite, okay. But I just think of the rocks and the trees and the smells, and just absolutely love it. And always have. And there's some tangential connection to Andrew Wyeth because I was first exposed to him in art school. And you quickly find out that he is just this side of an unspoken-of word. He is so controversial, which is difficult. But I loved his major tempera paintings and some of his best things. And of course, as you know, they often focus on Maine, and I think there's a deep connection and a beauty there that he has unearthed that I think is a worthy thing. So I enjoyed him. I still enjoy that work and that connection as well. So my connection with Maine goes fairly deep.

Lisa Belisle: And I believe that the Wyeth family also has a Pennsylvania connection, so that's kind of interesting.

Dale Roberts: They do. Yes, we go to the Brandywine River Museum, which is not very far away, and almost always make a point to drive past the Wyeth mill, which is off there on River Road. And there's a poignancy to all of that now that he's passed, and Betsy's gone. We were at the Brandywine River Museum one time when Andrew was walking through with a client, which is really pretty neat. And everybody stayed out of the way, they wanted to do that. There weren't many of us there. And he looked over and nodded and it was just a fun thing. So that connection is also strong. One has to be careful that one doesn't make that connection so strong that your work is a reprise, or too much of an echo, because it's a forceful thing.

Lisa Belisle: Well, Dale, I hope that you'll be coming up to Maine to perhaps one of our upcoming openings this summer. I hope I'll get a chance to meet you in person.

Dale Roberts: Absolutely. I think we're heading up there actually next week to drop some things off. I do plan to be up there in August for sure. And I would love that. I'm really looking forward to the relationship with the gallery and delighted for this interview. It's just been a great time.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. I've been speaking with artist Dale Roberts. I encourage you to come over to the Portland Art Gallery or check out Dale's work on the Portland Art Gallery website, and maybe if you come join us in August, we'll all have a chance to meet you, the person who is viewing or listening. Dale, it was nice to talk to you today.

Dale Roberts: Thank you. And you as well. You have a wonderful day, Lisa.