Visual Artist's Statement

My art has always exemplified my faith in subjective, idiosyncratic experience and the lyrical possibilities of untrammeled inwardness. My love of the image is a poetic, oneiric matter, and the resulting work a compendium of one imagination's lore, ever fed by the impact of its dreams.

Though I perceive no need for alignment with any cultural classification (other than the high and wide one of Romanticism), I am comfortable with the application of "Imagism" as conceived by art dealer Joe Adams in his 1994 Raw Vision article, "The Mississippi Imagists – Steve Shepard and David Thomas Roberts" (10Mb PDF). That I share visual and social territory with some Outsiders opens the door to my presentation in their good company, though my lifelong absorption of art of many places, times and inspiring individuals (my status as auto-didact notwithstanding) would seem to belie unqualified association. So I, the fashioner of innocent self-portrait prototypes, coarse and saucy nudes, magical backroads and dream-shacks, Victorian houses and arial gatherings, small town nocturnes and forests licking the moon – I, the terrain wrangler, the topographical rowdy bent upon revelation-through-landscape – pat the rump of "Imagist" with affection.

- David Thomas Roberts (September 22, 2008)