My work seeks to negotiate and express the connection between the lived experience and contradictions that govern that experience. Making sense of irony has led me to focus on two principal issues in recent years. One has to do with personal discovery – exploring my Southern African American family relationships, examining the myths, folktales, and religious beliefs that have direct bearing and influence on my upbringing in Lawrenceville, Virginia. The other is a little more elusive, relating to life in a broader sense – a life that is psychologically connected to but in many ways still separated from that upbringing - that relates to origin, ancestry, the passing of generations, and ultimately, the physical and psychological transformation of my small Southern rural community. Subsequently, I’ve been led to re-explore and reexamine the Southern heritage I come from, and to which I am still linked, painting objects, images, and symbols that reflect themes of that Southern African American life and lifestyles.
These two issues – exploring my Southern African American heritage and examining the generational transformation of my small hometown – also led to taking a deeper interest in the collective art and cultures of under-represented people of African descent, particularly those experiences that give visual expression to the spiritual world that is unique to these people and regions. Historical and cultural derivatives of Central and Western African cultures, are fixed by myths – myths of creation, myths of the after world, myths of supernatural mediation, myths of rites-of-passage, myths of love, and life - myths that simultaneously verify and cancel one another, myths that have the power to neutralize, transform, obliterate, or dislocate its practitioner are still present today and can be seen in many religious as well as day-to-day practices throughout the Black rural south. I began to see how the fractured nature of that collective cultural existence was closely related to my Southern African American community culture. Often, the aesthetic of under-represented peoples is one that absorbs and reconstructs all things as it forces new meaning from them. And much in keeping with the improvisational nature of that aesthetic I began to see bright colors, dense patterns, cluttered spaces, restless surfaces, objects at odds with themselves, and uneasy surroundings in the living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, TV rooms and dining areas in community homes I visited. Like many aspects of cultures that reflect some form of religious mediation in daily life, I began to see household “shrines” and decorative objects that aimed to mediate the otherwise, arbitrary, chaotic, uncertain, and unpredictable events one often encountered. I wanted to find a way to visually connect these elements when considered in the context of painting.
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"THE GREAT NORTHERN MIGRATION ", 1986
2010 ROBERT P. DILWORTH
PAINTER-WRITER
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