INTERVIEW BY TED GERSTLE:

When I knocked on the green door of Chris Roberson’s Logan Square studio, rain poured down and flooded the streets. Stepping inside, the room, at the foot of a tall Chicago staircase, was warm and inviting. There were scraps of wood, bits of violin and other elegance lying about on tables and work benches, and along the back wall a roughed up old loveseat. I was surprised to find that Chris was casually disarming, dressed in a plaid button shirt and jeans, he spoke comfortably, though was always cautious to frame the ideas and context of his work carefully. It should be noted that his Southern accent shines through only gently and only occasionally, but he carries his conversation with the deliberate pacing and glad gravitas of a true Southern gent. After a bit of general chit chat about the weather, we began to talk about Chris and his work.

How long have you been in Chicago?

I’ve been in Chicago for about 3 years this November. After I went to school, I moved out to Ireland for 4 or 5 months. Do you know the Book of Kells? It’s an illuminated manuscript written by monks. I worked at that museum for that summer, and did a some traveling around Western Europe.

So where did you go to school?

University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Right in the foothills of the mountains

That’s a beautiful area.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you feel like working at the Book of Kells influenced a lot of your other desires to work on projects?

Oh, definitely. I took a couple book-making classes in college, so that jump-started it and that’s how I got interested in the Book of Kells, plus I learned about it in graphic design history. You know, sometimes I use halos and stuff and I can’t help but think that comes from the Book of Kells. You go in there and it’s a completely black room and it just glows, all this gold leaf.

I definitely see the halos and the circle image in the art that you designed for Reelfoot. It seems like there’s an interplay between solid textural shapes and defined people and physicality. We talked a bit about this, can you talk a little bit about how the theme of sports fit into your mythology?

Growing up I was completely obsessed with sports. I thought about baseball all the time. I spent a lot of time by myself because my parents worked a lot. So I would come home from school and do these role playing things where I would pretend that I was different sports figures for hours and I would watch them on TV and watch the way that they moved and really try and pinpoint all their movements, so they definitely became these mythic figures for me. Manute Bol was my John Henry, the steel-driving man. But I was also pretty interested in art from a young age. I remember when I was nine or ten I did a series of drawings where I would take pictures of historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Lucille Ball, [laughs] people like that, and I would trace the figures and put them in baseball uniforms and create a whole team of historical people. It was like an all-star game too. Lucille Ball would be on the California Angels, I guess that team’s not even around anymore. [chuckles]

I think she would’ve been a great fit.

Yeah, Benjamin Franklin was on the Royals. My mom adored them and framed each and every one. That was probably the first series of serious drawings I did.

How did you get into sports? Is that something your parents were into?

Not really. My parents were somewhat athletic. I don’t really have an athletic body or anything. That’s probably why I quit once I hit puberty or whatever. They signed me up for soccer, I ended up playing baseball. And then collecting baseball and basketball cards made an impression. That’s probably the thing that got me into graphic design. Looking at these baseball cards. When I was in my mom’s office, sometimes I would Xerox these baseball cards, blow them up, and trace them and do different things with them.

Who was your favorite baseball player?

Growing up, I think it was Ryne Sandburg. Kind of weird to say after moving to Chicago because of the whole Cubs, White Sox controversy. But I played second base like him. I liked Ozzie Smith a lot too. I was also pretty obsessed with Jim Abbott. Remember him? He was the pitcher that only had one hand. He was an all-star pitcher but he only had one hand, so he would do this trick where he would put the stump in the glove, throw the pitch, then put his hand in the glove. He was super quick. It was amazing, I could watch it over and over again.

Do you feel the themes in your art are independent of each other, and that through your pieces they come together? Or do you feel that they come out of each other?

Now there’s totally different ways of thinking when I’m approaching each piece. I’m still debating on whether to include any of the sports-themed ones in my show at Country Club. It is a bit separate from the rest of my work and I almost want to save it and present all of them at one time. But I think the similarities are that I am kind of exulting these people into mythic proportions, or I’m trying to, you know, maybe even from a childish perspective.

I’m also kind of attracted, like Jim Abbott, to the sports figures who were slightly flawed. Like Kirby Puckett, who had that eye problem where he woke up one day and couldn’t see out of one eye. He never played baseball again. I’m almost attracted to the freaks of sports, like the ones that didn’t quite fit in, that kind of burned out.

I kind of think that there are three different directions that my heart’s going right now. I have these wooden pieces on panel that I’m doing, and then the sports area, and then my drawing and collage, which is kind of a completely different process for me.

The pieces on panel are more of a strict process where I work in my sketchbook and draft out the pieces, like an architect would. I map out every step of the process, how I’m going to do it, the colors for everything. I choose that before I actually lay my hands on anything. And it changes along the way, like anything does, but that’s kind of the interesting part of it. And then my collages are a lot more freeform. I usually start with pouring this brown paint that I make and then just responding to the shapes that it leaves, so it’s a lot less planned.

Do you make your paint?

Yeah, I ordered all these walnut hulls and I run them through a coffee maker and it makes this natural dye that I use like water color.

The textures are excellent.

Yeah, I get that from multiple pours.

I think the Lye Lips of all of the pictures of yours that I’ve seen is the hardest for me to interpret in terms of pieces of your work.

Yeah, thats a funny one. I poured the shape and it looked like lips. Then I started drawing really fat lips. It’s based off of a story of my father. When he was a kid, his mother was washing clothes, and I guess back in the day they used lye, for some part of that. And so he was a baby and he grabbed the lye and went to stick it in his mouth, and his sister, right as it touched his lips, pulled it out of his mouth, but it kind of rolled his lip under. So, he’s got a really big bottom lip, and I never thought, I just thought that he was born that way. Until a few months ago, my mom told me this story, and I was like, oh that’s why my dad has a big lip.

I had that in my mind and then the shape that stain made and it all kind of came together in that way.

That’s really interesting. Do you find a lot of other childhood themes resurfacing in your art?

Yeah, I like the way that children draw. I like the simplicity of it. That’s kind of where the sun pieces are coming from. You know the first thing that a kid draws or learns to draw is the sun. They draw a yellow circle and they draw straight lines coming off as rays, so I’ve just been trying to make images that are really simple and stripped down, that hopefully someone can stare at for a while. But most of the time I’ll make the themes more adult. You have the center of the sun, which is just like a kid would draw it, but then I’m replacing the rays with more violent and more dark images.

I think that it makes the pieces very bold. I also see a lot of textures because the images are very simple, as you said. To me, texture is something that’s very apparent in the brown paint that you made and in the materials that you choose. Is that something that’s deliberate or something that maybe comes out of the process?

It probably comes out of the process. I mean, when I moved into this space, I think there’s so much woodworking equipment around that I kind of started doing that by default. You know, I’m kind of a bad woodworker as far as my craft goes. I share this studio with a violin maker who does really fine craft, and it takes him a month or longer to make a violin, working every day. And then I’m over here, feeling like a hack sometimes, chopping up the wood, but it does create maybe more of a texture, and that’s probably because I let errors happen. I’m trying to learn how to have less control over my materials and work with my materials as opposed to against them, instead of trying to shove them in the box, I want to let them become what they want to be. Which is hard as a graphic designer, because every line, everything has to be perfect. When I leave work and come here, that’s kind of the last thing I want to do. I kind of just want to make a mess.

Can you talk a little bit about your day job?

I got my BFA in graphic design. I moved up here and I work for Hefty Records, which is an electronic and experimental music label , mostly instrumental music. When I moved up here and I emailed them out of the blue. They needed an in-house designer, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple years. They’re kind of in a transitional phase so I’m not doing as much creative work or as many record covers and stuff as I’d like to do.

Can you talk about the drinking in your artwork? I see a lot of bottles and bottle themes.

I’m not sure where that came from exactly.

Do you enjoy drinking?

I came from an Irish Catholic family, so we drink when we’re happy and we drink when we’re sad. I don’t know if you know the artist Barry McGee. He does a lot of paintings on glass bottles. He’s been a big influence for me. I think it’s really interesting to take something that’s made out of glass and cut it out of wood. That process is enjoyable to me. I’m still kind of, I just have my toes in the water with this. But I’ve been using them as a canvas for different messages, either things that I write or that I pick out of old folk songs. The one that’s on my website: “If I get drunk, just let me fall”. I was watching this old Alan Lomax documentary about the mountain people in the Appalachia, there’s this one old fiddle player who starts singing that phrase. I thought, “That’s the weirdest song I have ever heard.” But he also probably wrote that song because he had a still, you know, a moonshine still in the woods. I wrote it down and carved it into a piece of wood.

So is this theme a recent development?

It’s one that I keep coming back to, but I haven’t completely jumped into it a hundred percent. We’ll see, I don’t know.

Something else that ties to that work is death, too. I feel like death is apparent in the halos and in the moonshine and drinking themes, that you’re flirting with danger. And also in the writing, in the lyrics and poetry. How did that develop in your work?

I’m not sure. I think lots of times people… it’s still kind of strange, doing stuff about death when you’re twenty-six years old, you know, but I think it’s a thing that lots of people, when they get to this stage, start thinking about. I heard this songwriter say one time that if you’re not writing about God, love, or death, why are you writing. It’s interesting you know. Fear is something that people can study forever. Fear of death is uncertainty. I guess that’s something that I’m interested in more than actual death. When things are getting bad, what do people turn to? Right now things are pretty bad, so some people are turning to religion or superstition, some people are turning to violence. Some people are optimistic, born that way, some people aren’t.

Do you see your work as being political?

I don’t think it’s political. I think it is relevant to the times, even though I am heavily influenced by old things. When I first moved up to Chicago, we moved up here in November and it was the coldest winter I have ever experienced, growing up in Tennessee. And I got a job, right when I moved here, valeting. So I was outside all winter parking rich people’s cars. I was miserable. I would go to a library downtown, and I just started checking out records, old Library of Congress records, Alan Lomax field recordings. I started sifting through these records and listening to the lyrics and these are records that were recorded in the Thirties and stuff, but I was amazed at how relevant they all seemed and how current the themes were and they can transcend time that way.

Sometimes I’ll do a piece of work and it will come from an old place, but then I’ll realize there’s definitely current significance. “Come Hell Or High Water,” that was actually, my girlfriend said that one time, which just means “let’s do this, we’re determined.” So I just started thinking about this phrase and it was really interesting, so I did this piece with the phrase, and it started to become, especially with all these hurricanes right now, they’re getting hell and high water. So to me it seems current, I don’t know how other people will read it, but not political.

After that, the conversation turned generally to drinking and sports. Elements here remind me strongly of the old set of writers: Hemmingway, Frederick Exley, Richard Ford…drinking, sports, death, these are the old bells that keep ringing. Seeing elements of poetry, lyrics, and text literally written into some of Chris’ work, I can’t help but think of America’s old bards and how their work remains relevant and fresh still today.