With wilderness as his muse, artist Casey Roberts' cyanotype paintings capture the lens through which we experience the natural world. The artist's work considers this relationship balancing the harmony and dissolution of Man and nature. Casey may represent Man by rendering a subject like an illuminated house in the woods, initials carved into tree trunks, potted plants, or a cat on a rug. His work depicts domestic iconography as it relates to flora and fauna. Animals, birds, and insects join compositions of plants and flowers to create poetic images.
Casey's paintings also draw upon the cyclical quality of nature. Wooden tables, axes, vases, skulls, and ghostlike forms are coupled with an array of natural elements to create narrative scenes rich with metaphor and evocative in simplicity. Various references to seasons and the passage of time add to the story the artist tells while referencing different areas of the world imbues the work with a universality.
A Civil War-era process dating back over 150 years, cyanotype utilizes photochemical reactions to harness the power of light. Casey's chosen medium and subject matter go hand in hand as the artist plays with the complexity of light and shadow, building serene scenes featuring luminous silhouettes, moonlit bodies of water, or sunlight washing across interior subjects. The artist moves forward and backward through the cyanotype process deepening cerulean hues or altering them to shades of green and gold as it suits the imagery he is rendering.
Meditative and alluring, Casey Robert's work invites curiosity and soothes the soul while acknowledging our symbiotic and sometimes fraught relationship with the world around us.
"My work is synonymous with a fairytale; the paintings are dark, yet humorous. Animals play a leading role and the work blends together to form a narrative. There's a moral of the story, one that hints at humans' relationship with nature with a knowing wink. There is an intuitive wisdom in nature." –Casey Roberts
