Passion for color inspires artist's work
by Louise Turner
"Some people see a mountain as brown; others, blue or green; the fortunate
see it red with pink rocks. There are the golden grasses of the fall,
that I used to run my toes through when I was little; my mind, or sometimes
my physical self, is up in the Sangre de Cristos (mountain range) with
the sweet green of the aspens in early summer or my spirit lifts to the
pale turquoise sky that Victor Higgins painted in Taos. Perhaps this is
the way I see my life. ..colored, in hues. I dream in color. Some will
say my life is too colored-that I have colored it up a bit too richly,
but this is the way it has been so far. Richly colored has been my life,
and sometimes black."
Silver City artist Dolona Roberts cuddles her dog.
The quote, at left, appears in the journal of Silver
City artist Dolona Roberts, formerly of Santa Fe. To know this typically reticent woman is to know that she has
just spoken an atypical, deeply personal, "richly colored" mouthful.
Roberts has been interviewed hundreds of times, and her remarks about art, art
movements, style, color, influence or inspiration have appeared in print in
regional, national and international publications.
But rarely does she comment publicly on her private life, even
when it has had an impact on her creative life.
And, in fact, the quotes which appear in this article are from her private
journal. It is not that she is secretive or reclusive or press-shy. Indeed,
she is a willing and fascinating participant in the interview process.
She simply does not usually incorporate the subjective into her comments,
preferring to keep her remarks objective and pertinent to a specific body
or genre of work. 
That she speaks presently of color as analogous to her life as well as
to her work provides new insight about the artist. It is color that consumes
her creative being, and color is her metaphor for living. Her journal
entries often validate the parallel.
Her teachers were all exception- al colorists in their respective mediums,
and they passed on their passion for color to Roberts. Much has been written
about her years under the tutelage of ]ozef Bakos (one of Santa Fe's Cinco
Pintores), Kenneth Adams (a member of the Taos Society of Artists), abstract
expressionist Elaine de Kooning and Santa Fe impressionist Randall Davey.
But there was another teacher who was a vital influence when Roberts was
a little girl. My teachers. ..colorists, all of them. But when I was in
the first grade, our teacher got sick and she was out of school much of
that year. We had six substitute teachers. One of them was Mrs. Mae Washburn,
who was a still- life artist. She didn't know what in the world to do
with 25 first- graders. She helped us entertain ourselves.
Tablita & Blankets, a 44-inch by 40-inch acrylic on canvas.
I remember that she drew outlines on stencils. ..of adobe houses,
flowers, Indian pots, animals, cartoons, anything. She ran the stencils
on a mimeo- graph machine. ..gave us those sheets of outlined things.
We colored in the spaces with crayons. All day,
for days and days. I don't know about the other kids. Heaven, for me,"
the journal informs us.
Roberts attributes another early awareness of color to her father's flower shop in Santa Fe, where she spent hours as a little girl watching him make floral arrangements. She played with rivulets of colored ribbons and wandered through the nursery admiring the plants being nurtured to their blossoming for holiday times.
Recently, as she worked with serigrapher Peter Igo, she observed that
the colors ". ..fall gracefully on white paper, blocking out the
white to become red orange, blue, red oxide, golden ochre. ..to enrich,
to color life. .. the patterns of 50 years falling into place. ..."
Tablita Three -I, a 42-inch by 52-inch acrylic on canvas.
It was, perhaps, an instance of dejavu for the artist who remembered herself as a child mashing blossoms to make colors on white paper in her father's flower shop. Today, her obsession with color and her early exposure to flowers is evident in her love of gardening. In her outdoor garden in Silver City , clay pots filled with varieties of blossoms, succulents, perennials and annuals border a high fence that surrounds the artist's home. The purples of petunias, magnificent magenta begonias and the pink/yellow /lavender Diego Rivera calla lilies (as Roberts refers to them) suggest a living fresco on the white back- ground of the fence.
NEW MEXICO MAGAZINE / AUGUST 1994