Maggy Roberts is a former children’s book illustrator and lecturer in Illustration who now paints subjects of her own choice. She is inspired by existing landscapes but does not seek to recreate them in a representational way.
“The landscapes in my paintings have a life of their own, emerging from the various layers of colour that they evoke emotionally. Having painted in the bright sunshine of Catalunya where intense colour was gradually bleached out of the landscape as the year advanced, on my return to the rich landscapes of Wales my palette became brighter and more colourful. At the beginning of the 20th century, Derain, Matisse and Vlaminck etc. were known as the Fauves or ‘wild beasts’, on account of the exaggerated, non-naturalistic colours deployed in their work. This had its roots in the work of Paul Gaugin and proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary that could be used to express an artist’s feelings about a subject rather than simply describing the scene. I’m travelling down a similar path, utilising impulsive and expressive brushwork and abstracted shapes. I’m less concerned with the direct representation of a particular scene than with exploring my own emotional fantasy of colour.
There is still a landscape to be seen but it is flattened so that its decorative qualities can be explored and whilst some tonal contrasts are retained the colours are transposed dramatically. Every school child who mixes a grey to paint a road in their picture has been (hopefully?) urged by their art teacher to look more closely at the road and find the greens and pinks that are to be seen there in reality.
I’m at the extreme end of this adventure, finding colours that can sing and dance together.”