Forty of his newest mixed-media paintings — from the books of Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms and Proverbs — are being shown in a group exhibition at the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wis., through June 16.
“I love that he has set this task for himself,” said Anastasia Shartin, the Phipps Center’s visual arts director. “These are foundational stories in our culture and they are stories that are shared across religions, or at least they inform other religions.”
Shartin has been fascinated to see those stories told with “a very contemporary visual approach.”
After reading a less archaic version of the Bible to get the general gist of a chapter, Robertson combs the King James Version page by page for intriguing text, marking his picks with a highlighter that he’s taped to the front. Then he sketches and paints. He’s struck by vivid scenes and strange turns of phrase. He free-associates, incorporating themes that have long preoccupied his work — the way humans are devastating the planet, the ways in which we “entertain ourselves to distract ourselves from loneliness.”
He was struck by how dark the Old Testament feels today, by its preoccupations with circumcision and contentious women. “Psalms was so violent,” he noted. “You hear the word ‘psalms’ and think, beautiful, poetic. But it was mostly King David wishing ill will upon people he wanted to conquer while praying for his own good fortune. You definitely have to pry out the good.
“It’s contextual; I’m not trying to oversimplify. But it’s crazy how weird it was.”
Sometimes, he makes it a little weirder. He came across Psalms 107:23 and highlighted it: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.”
That brought back a memory of canoeing down the Mississippi River with a friend, when the Asian carp were jumping. “One jumped, hit him in the back and left a bruise,” Robertson said. “Stained his shirt.” It got him thinking about invasive species.
The vibrant finished painting features a pink couple wearing colourful life vests and traversing geometric waves in a motorboat. Carp fly through the air and into the boat. One, it seems, is even tucked under the woman’s arm. The man in back is steering, but his eyeglasses have fallen off his face. The piece’s bold lines feel perfect, pop art.
During a recent afternoon in his south Minneapolis home, Robertson grabbed a thick stack of paintings in protective plastic sleeves out of a safe he got at a rummage sale. He found the oldest paintings in the group — “Genesis.” Those paintings are looser, maybe cruder. They share some DNA with “The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb,” the comic legend’s take on the Bible’s best-known book.
Over six years, this project has accompanied Robertson through big career and life changes, evidence of which sneaks into some of his paintings. (One features a discarded angle grinder, a nod to Robertson’s work as a home tiler.) Three years ago, Robertson got married. Two years ago, he became a father. (He took a year off from the Old Testament to care for his son.) The tiling work taught him a kind of discipline. The child brought him an urgency about the state of the world.
Along the way, he and Maierhofer, who lives in Idaho, ruminated over how to keep going. “This question of enduring with it,” Maierhofer said. “Figuring out a ritual that would allow him to keep making these things.” Robertson, he noted, “does have a worker’s sensibility.”
Robertson, who earned a BFA in studio arts with a focus on sculpture from the University of Minnesota, often paints standing up, the pocket of reused jeans slung across the front of his work table, holstering his markers and pens. He mixes and builds colour and texture with house paint, a material “some people are snotty about,” he said. But Richardson appreciates how versatile it is — and how cheap. He knew he’d be making about 260 paintings before getting paid for them. He’s hoping the paintings will become a thick 12-by-12-inch book that includes the full text of the Old Testament.
He plans to sell that book door-to-door, knocking on strangers’ doors as an accompanying performance piece.
That built-in audience he was hoping for? Hasn’t materialized — at least yet. Some people expect the work to be rigid, religious art. “I think people see ‘illustrated Old Testament’ and say, ‘Next,’?” he said. “And then for religious people, it’s too subversive for them to be interested in.
“All potential groups are ostracized from the get-go.”
But he’s seen what happens when people get close to the work, when they read the accompanying text. When they realize that Moses is a construction worker, that the cherub is an old man, that God is wearing shorts, working at a standing desk.
