About Petal Joan Roberts

‘See! See!’ I said with my tiny finger pointing at something. According to my
parents, my first word was neither Mamma or Dadda, but ‘See!’

Looking back at my art work over the years since the 1960’s, I realise that
that is precisely what I want my viewers to do. To see what I see.

After my first art college years trying to imitate what I could see in nature or
anywhere else, I began to look beyond that to the more underlying aspects
of our life here. The mysteries, the legends, the different ways people
approach the same questions we are all faced with. This led me partly to
the world of what is now called fantasy, but which is really only our
collective imagination.

Moving in the 1950’s to England from tropical British Guiana (now Guyana)
in South America was my first meeting with people who had different
answers to life. Some 14 years later, moving to Denmark, as a result of
academic unemployment in the UK, was my second meeting with people
who had yet another answer, as also was my third move, to Sweden in
1971.  All these meetings loosened up my mind from what otherwise might have become a set way of thinking, and later on I began to look back to my childhood environments and saw people, the original inhabitants of my native country, who had yet another way of working out the puzzles of existence.

Some of my work began to be inspired by the work of other cultural actors, writers. I made a series of etchings based on the work of Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy. Without consciously thinking of it, all the pictures dealt with things that happened in the mind of the boy: hallucinations, visions and so on. *  I also made a series of etchings and a painting on one of the ancient Greek legends, the story of Leda and the Swan. At the same time I began yet another series of my own dreams and ideas that explored the experience of being a woman in
a man-dominated world: ‘Ave Maria’ et al.

On my own for a while in Sweden and having nothing else to do, I made a number of watercolour illustrations to the Tolkien trilogy which above all deals with a large number of questions surrounding our existence and our behaviour while alive. Now, life in the new countries meant discovering new things, and they began to creep into my work. In Sweden, the way the country people build fascinated me, as there seemed to be no rule, apart from ‘will it stand?’ that governed their farm buildings. Another series resulted, this time of frottage on Japanese paper stretched on rough wood frames: an experiment in how far I could push the paper before it tore. I called it ‘In the Country’.  **

And now I am involved in a new series of works, in various media, based on the legends of my former compatriots in South America, whose ideas on where we come from, what morals we should adopt, and so on, have a remarkable affinity with Tolkien’s world.  This time, I hope I can act as a bridge between the world of the forest-dwellers and the ‘Sarumans’ of the rest of the world who regard the former as expendable.  The Amerindian world is not one world, each group has its own version and all their legends are full of humour and great insight into human nature.  They are important stories whose originators have as much right to live in their own environment as anyone else. These are my ”Legends of the Rainforest” and  ”Heavens, the Earth, Underworlds” works. ***

*      ‘The Crystal Cave’, ‘The Hollow Hills’, ‘The last Enchantment’
**     See selected pictures in Gallery
***   See selected pictures in Gallery