I recently returned from teaching two one week workshops at Anderson Ranch, both combining paint and collage material.  Much of the class is teaching students different ways to add surfaces to their substrates, using photographic images, paint, or material transferred be it paint or marks or photographs or text, to name just a few.  There is something thrilling about making a painting by not just painting on the surface with a brush, but by adding to it and  not being quite sure what you are going to get. Sometimes you get magic, and sometimes not. This panel started out as a ..read more

For the past two years I have been finding homes for my paintings.  Fifty years of working on a regular basis creates a lot of work. I've been contacting museums, art centers, and universities to see if they would like to add my work to their collections, and, once they agree, I began the arduous process of locating, packing, and shipping the work to them. As well, in March of this year,  MOPA at the San Diego Museum of Art opened a 40 year retrospective of my work. An enormous undertaking, it pretty much consumed me for much those two years.  Between the two, and because it ha ..read more

The legs and arms are mine, the small dogs representational of our two small dogs, Niko and Sophie.  The head is from a religious painting, giving the image the proper seriousness needed.  It’s raining a dry, warm, rain, familiar to the desert we live in.  With women’s rights and privileges being eroded away, the power of this figure, with her strong arms and legs and her calm, serene face, seemed to be what I needed to show our strength and determination not to be made less ..read more

   Bits normally lay comfortably in the interdental space between the incisors and premolars, commonly called the “bars” of the mouth. Except when they don’t.   I ride three times a week:  two days in the arena and one day with a riding instructor, trying to learn the basics of dressage while also trying to teach the mare I ride, Joey, the same.  Dressage has been called the gymnastics of horseback riding, and has to do with the horse and rider learning to accommodate each other with the movements of their bodies.  If I were to compare myself to a child learning ..read more

For almost two years now, I haven't really been making images.  I've been trying to find homes for my work, and also have been preparing for a retrospective exhibit at MOPA, now part of the San Diego Museum of Art( StoryTeller: Work by Holly Roberts ).  In March, I created a temporary studio in Austin, Texas, while staying there to spend time with our daughter and her young family. While there, I painted, and tried not to make too big a mess since my workspace was in the living room of the small condo we were staying in.  When we returned to New Mexico, using a pane ..read more

I ride a friends horse several times a week, and when I’m done riding I go next door to the neighbors to let out her three horses, who have been confined so that they will not eat each other’s food.  The neighbor works during the day, so I like to give them the very large horse pleasure of being in close proximity. Blixa, a pony, is one of the horses.  He is in his twenties, short and very stout, and was probably once grey but is now white.  When I let him out he races past me and charges over to the other two horses, ears pinned, teeth bared, often bucking and rearing as he c ..read more

  My husband and I have been spending the month of March(last year January)in Austin, TX to spend time with our young grandson, now 3 1/2. This year I decided to set up a small studio space so that I could work while we are here. Among other things, I purchased an inexpensive black and white laser printer,  a floor lamp and a new 5 foot folding table. I brought most of my supplies from home, and after several trips to Goodwill and retrieving items from the curb, I managed to set up my space. It’s quite tight, and the main thing I find that I lack is space to spread out so that I can ..read more

In 1987 I painted "Saying Goodbye" after a tough loss. This last week, I pulled the image out of my flat file storage, and packed it up, along with 23 other paintings that have been donated to Wright State University in Ohio(Wright State has a wonderful and unique lending program where students can check art work out for the semester from the Museum's collection).  Once again, it was difficult putting together such a large body of work and sending it off, but this particular piece was especially hard to let go of.  I think partially because I am at a time in my life where I'm saying ..read more

 On March 30 of this year, the Museum of Photographic Art at the San Diego Museum of Art, will present my work in a 40 year retrospective.  The exhibit, titled "Storyteller:  Works by Holly Roberts" will run until Aug. 18, and will include 59 pieces of mine created from 1980 until 2023. There will be a beautiful book to go along with the retrospective with an essay by Deborah Klochko, former director of MOPA.  At the end of the exhibit all 59 pieces will go into the permanent collection of the Museum.  For the past several weeks, I've been preparing the work to be de ..read more

  I have a problematic relationships with squirrels.  We have just a few in our neighborhood, but when I go to a place where they are plentiful, they make me nervous with their herky-jerky movments, and their lightening like ability to go up and over just about anything that is vertical. A student once brought me a dead squirrel wrapped in leaves (the same student had also brought me a dead snake a few days before which I scanned and then had to get rid of because of the smell), which is where the squirrel in this image comes from. The story is ominous to me, with the bare trees a ..read more