Julia Roberts’ prints evoke the Southwest’s long history
Julia Roberts — the artist, not the actress — has followed her own muse to the Southwest. After years in Hawaii, Australia and a long sojourn in Europe, she is now comfortably ensconced in Santa Fe and showing new works at Dorothy Rogers Fine Art, a tiny gallery in The Design Center. Roberts is especially known for her printmaking in a variety of methods, and will lecture “About Prints” Saturday afternoon at the gallery. Backed up by the 37 prints she’s showing in a current exhibition at Rogers, she’ll talk about her use of intaglio, especially through etching, aquatint, lift-ground, drypoint and carborundum methods, separately and in combination. “Which methods I use, and in which combinations, depend on the complexity of the image I am intending to create,” she said. “Intaglio is the general term for most of the methods I use in creating a plate for printing. The term comes from Italian, meaning to carve. Intaglio is the opposite of relief printing, where ink sits on the surface of the plate, as in linocuts or woodblock printing. In the intaglio method, the plate is developed through processes to hold ink below the surface. The pressure used to force the ink into the paper also produces an embossed border, the plate mark, on the finished print — a characteristic that makes it easy to identify the work as an intaglio print.”
Her prints in the Rogers show, ranging in size from 3.8-inch-square to 25.25-inch by 23.25-inch, are mostly in two subjects, nudes and Native American pots.
“I find these subjects to be oddly similar,” the artist said. “Both are quiet, complex and fascinating vessels, always provoking contemplation and exploration.”
Trained as a teacher at Indiana University and having taught secondary and university classes in Hawaii and Australia, Roberts decided a couple of decades ago to concentrate on her own art. She had begun doing serious work in ceramics in Honolulu in the late 1970s, and it was that portfolio that got her accepted at Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art. In the 1980s, while working steadily in paint and pastel, she financed her personal work with jobs for print media — book and magazine illustration and graphic design. The largest project involved 240-plus drawings for the travel classic “Journey to the High Southwest,” now in its eighth edition after nearly 24 years in print. No Southwest for Roberts, though. She moved to Europe, where she made a living teaching small workshops and master classes while she learned ever more about the methods of printmaking. She remained in Europe for 16 years, teaching at London’s Slade School of Fine Art and Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design in London, as well as master classes and small-group workshops in Paris. She also had an enduring relationship, working and printing, at the London Print Studio.
Although Roberts said she has a special affinity for drawing and painting, including pastels, her love of fine arts finally developed into a consuming passion for the highly demanding and technical art of printmaking, with an emphasis on the various classical methods of etching.
Roberts had never been dogmatic about her choices, allowing herself to be guided by duties, obligations and personal circumstances. She was always “curiously haunted and intrigued,” however, by the Native American artifacts she had drawn years before for “High Southwest.” These improbable memories pulled her to New Mexico. Now she is a “firmly settled” resident of Santa Fe, and working in paint, pastels and print. Her show at Dorothy Rogers Fine Art will be up through June 14.
If You Go
WHAT: Solo show of prints by Julia Roberts
WHEN: Through June 14; lecture ‘About Prints’ 2 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: Dorothy Rogers Fine Art, The Design Center, 418 Cerrillos Road
CONTACT: 955-1984
