Blues Brothers in Chicago

Oxides, acrylic paint, with intaglio lineation on canvas on board, 60cm x 120cm, unframed. © circa 2002-3 W Roberts. Inspired by the original eighties Blues Brothers movie.

Painting - The World of Ray Charles

Inspired by Ray Charles : the music and the man. Acrylic (titanium, black and gold) painted with the hands and scumbled brush on gauze-collage on loosely stretched unframed canvas. 102cm x 76cm. © 2008 W Roberts

Reg Roberts - artist - my father

Here's an oil study of Gippsland, Australia by my father (artist's collection, circa early 1950's, oil on canvas, 40.6cm x 50.8cm).

This painting was an inspiration to me my brother and two sisters. My parents gave most of their paintings from those years to friends while my father was studying for his PhD. He was a CSIRO scientist (grassland insect ecologist), always had an eye for patterns, an intuition for discerning the 'dynamics of interconnectedness'. His research presented an ecological contribution to the concept of 'biodiversity'.

In this painting there's an effective very limited palette of colours used.

Watercolour brush

This brush has travelled a very long way through water, with watercolour, on watercolour paper.

Winsor & Newton Series 7.

Photographed here resting on my studio palette. One of my oldest brushes.

with Cerulean blue

Judith Roberts - artist - my mother

This is a 1954 oil painting of my mother's. Logger's Trail (the Rockies). I thought it needed to be seen by a wider audience. You can see I'm not the only one of my family (all of whom are artists) who's inspired by mountains. I hope to post an oil of my father's of the Gippsland region in Australia from around the same time .. so keep an eye out for that one.. cheers~W

Alps near Briancon

Transparent watercolour on Arches 640gsm cold-pressed paper. © W Roberts.
This work was inspired by the Hungarian/American watercolorist Ted Kautzsky. See 'mountains in watercolour' web page for further info and mountains in watercolour.

Resonances in a seaside rock pool

There is a small rockpool near Murramarang on the NSW south coast

Resonance 1: Fleming's discovery of the Penicillium mould's ability to inhibit the growth of bacteria in the vicinity of the mould.

Resonance 2 'Earth from space' (islands, the pool's circle becomes the arc of Earth's oceans)


Resonance 3 "The Starry Night" (stars, nebulae, and constellations).

© 2005-2008 W Roberts

National Museum of Australia

Linda and I visited the NMA last weekend. Fantastic exhibition there by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996), one of Australia's preeminent contemporary artists. An inspiration and a revelation. If you have time it's worth checking the link to see the massive Big Yam Dreaming painting, amongst her most celebrated works. There's a new page of my photographic images of the NMA on my website. The architects of this incredible museum were Ashton Raggatt McDougall and Robert Peck von Hartel Trethowan. Emily Kame Kngwarreye's work is already further inspiring my thinking (particularly about the expressive power of line --a metaphor of interconnectedness). Although she was virtually isolated from all other traditions in art (Utopia, Central Australia) her work profoundly resonates to universal themes and rhythms transcending boundaries of culture and time.