Creating an Oral History

African-American Oral Histories

Deborah Roberts
Clip 2: Transcript

Development As An Artist

Running Time: 7 min 10 sec

CC: When you talk about art you do you talk about how the art develops. What sort of, how do you go about approaching your art, what’s?

DR: Oh, wow. Well, I’m just going talk about my past experiences about how I approached art.

CC: Okay.

DR: It was all based on what I saw in the community and how I figured that African Americans were not being seen. So, what I wanted to do was create everyday scenes of everyday life. My favorite artists and it has--God it’s changed--was Norman Rockwell. I loved Norman Rockwell. Man, I was hot for Norman Rockwell. And I loved the fact that he just painted everyday scenes and they were great; it was Americana. But he only rarely ever painted Black people, and maybe three times: “In God we Trust,” “The Little Rock Girl” and that was Little Rock 7, 6 or whatever--and one other time. I just knew that I wanted to be the Black Norman Rockwell. So, if he excluded us from his paintings I definitely was going to put them in mine. My approach to art was to show African Americans in everyday life and not what you saw on T.V. So, and that was very important to me. And it was always the human experience. And so, I would just paint these large paintings dealing with that. And then it was okay.

But as I grew older you know, and society grew sexier then painting things of little kids running through fields was just not important anymore because things had changed. People did not want see those, I didn’t feel, I think there are still people out there who that would love that type of work, who will buy it. But it didn’t really work for me anymore because I’ve done all of that. We know this about ourselves. We don’t have to see it in paintings anymore. So, what I wanted to start working on was how others saw us, not how we saw us, we know how we look. I wanted to start, like you know, flip the switch and do it how I felt others perceived us. I started letting the work move itself, instead of doing stuff narrative, I would start doing things more symbolically, whereas--

CC: When you say, “I let the work move itself” [DR coughs].

DR: Right.

CC: What do you mean by that?

DR: I used to control it. There were times in different types of paintings where I let the work--I don’t know. You know, I think everybody paints a certain way. Norman Rockwell painted a certain way. He never did abstract work because people knew him as this one type of illustrative painter. And if he was to come out and start doing abstract [paintings], then people would think, “Well, what is he doing? We know him for this?” And so, he may have always wanted to do abstract [paintings]. And so what I did was when I was painting, anytime something came out that was a little you know [abstract], I would add different types of techniques to [it]. I would always start controlling it, because I said, “Well, that’s not what I’m known for and people wouldn’t understand that.” So I would control those urges to do something different with my work. And so, it only took, I mean it was five years ago that I started letting the work move itself. And what happened was, when you do that you tend to lose sales and customers and your fan base because what you doing is you’re letting whatever type of artist, and when that happens it may not even be the artist that people are used to seeing. And that’s what happened with my work. When I stopped controlling it and started allowing it to develop this whole new avenue, this whole new process of art making emerged. And it’s nothing like what I know. I fight it a lot because the first thing I think of is that people think I can’t paint, when I’ve spent years and years and years of trying to make my paint look very painterly and to make the canvas move and not just be a still portrait or somebody’s life canonized in that one moment. I always wanted the work to move across the plane and it took a lot of work to get that to do that.

So, when the work started to develop and to go even more abstract, I allowed it to happen. And I’m glad I did because now I’m at a point with the work that I’m producing that I’m very comfortable with and it’s showing the type of work that I wanted, the type of image that I felt that needed to be projected. I think it’s very self-rewarding. If nothing else no one else thinks of it as being that, to me, I can know, I know now as an artist I allowed the work to grow. Now it may make, eventually make a big ol’circle and I might just be right at the arch of this and then I might continue to let the art grow and it may just come all the way back to me painting those harmonious types of paintings. I mean, who knows? Life is a circle. And it’s always ever evolving and repeating and so I don’t know if that’s happening or not. It doesn’t appear to be happening because I don’t miss painting. I love painting, but I don’t miss it. And for me not to miss it, this has to be working. Because, you know if not I would be doing paintings on the side and still doing this. But I have no need to paint right now in the sense of adding oil to brush, brush to paint, because I’m getting that same type of fulfillment out of what I’m doing right now so.

Disclaimer:
“Oral Narrative as History.” Students received class credit for this work, and were under the supervision of Dr. Martha Norkunas, director of “The Project in Interpreting the Texas Past.”

Every effort has been made to transcribe the audio recordings exactly. On occasion a word, or phrase, was difficult to hear and this is indicated by a question mark in brackets.

Interviewee:
Deborah Roberts

Interviewer:
Clare Croft

Date of Interview:
February 8, April 4, 2006

Place:
Deborah Robert’s home, Austin, Texas

Recording Format:
Edirol digital recorder, Uncompressed wave file

Transcriber:
Clare Croft