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The moose in the picture (left) is one that Mary bought from a taxidermist. She uses it as a model in her paintings. She is not a hunter.
Mary Roberson was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1948 but moved to Redondo Beach, California when her family Relocated. The artist's love for art began at a very early age. Mary Roberson says: "In retrospect, I played games with this gift. Sometimes I tried to ignore it, and sometimes it just welled up inside of me until it won me over, and the gift got its way. . .It has always been a tug of war between getting out of the way to let it happen, and running a huge list of games to give it a hard time." The reasons for this "warfare" are complex, deep rooted, and part of Mary Roberson’s character.
Her parents always supported the pull of art in Mary Roberson’s life. At ten the Guadalupe Church in Hermosa Beach, California, commissioned her to paint a fourteen-foot mural. It was a landscape, and the artist felt as if she was the medium through which the scene appeared. This may sound "mystical", Mary Roberson acknowledges, but "art is mystical, and creativity is even more puzzling. It seems to happen effortlessly when the self goes on sabbatical, which comes and goes like the ebb and flow of a tide." During high school Mary Roberson's teachers took a personal interest in her love for art. They encouraged her, believing that she had a wonderful gift that required cultivation and care, especially in contrast to A rebellious nature. They seemed to see something in her that she often tended to minimize or down play.
By sixteen, Mary Roberson had developed her own style of painting. She shunned formal training, partly as rebellion but also because she sensed that “art lessons” might impair or somehow damage what was already complete within her. As she began to win awards, recognition put Mary Roberson into a limelight which she found uncomfortable. But Mary Roberson says, “The Gift never left me and I could feel its presence in the background. It was rooting for me to get on with it so it could find the light of day.” And it was as if art itself was her secret life preserver. It was her best friend.
Life is a long road, a mixture of the negative and the positive. The urge to pick up the brush and paint again showed up when she divorced her husband in 1991. Once again, art came to her rescue to remind her that creativity was, perhaps, the purpose for life itself. Try as hard as she might, she could not resist the lure of her gift, and little by little it became the path she followed. Mary Roberson has always loved animals, and they became the focus for her art. They became her inspiration. She loved animals and art, and by putting the two together she discovered that she could love herself too.
“When I look back at my story, I am moved by the war I waged with truth, and I am so thankful that I am free now to paint to my heart’s content. I love to camp in Yellowstone, where the wildlife roams free, posing for digital camera sessions, while I enjoy the relative peace and quiet of my growing love for this profound mystery that is life itself. When I wake up in the morning, I visualize canvases that wait for me to show up and deliver the goods. There is a growing excitement in the air, and, for me, it is all about capturing the essence of this dream on canvas.”
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