Looking at a painting by Stone Roberts is like people-watching. One of the greatest people-watching sites in the world is Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The centerpiece of Roberts’ new exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art is a people-filled depiction of that busy transportation hub.
Everyone who sees the stunning painting will come away with a different favorite person. The dark-haired woman in the blue sweater and huge sunglasses, front and center. The old man in the black coat and red scarf, arms behind his back, seeming to wait for someone impatiently. The pregnant woman in a low-cut blouse. The three young men in yarmulkes, staring at either a cute blonde or a kissing couple. The two city cops, helmeted and armed to the teeth. The guy in the red baseball cap, probably a tourist, looking upward with awe.
A few talk to other people, but most don’t — residents of a crowded but emotionally isolated city. He said in an interview that at times he feels isolated from his fellow New Yorkers.
“When I’m not painting, I’m oblivious to everybody,” Roberts said. “When you go out on the street, you sort of take people for granted. Then I started watching and saw the interesting ways that people maneuver and relate to the world that they are passing through.”
Nine of Roberts’ works are on exhibit: the Grand Central piece, street scenes from New York and Rome, an interior portrait of two people preparing for guests, a depiction of a dock filled with boaters, and still lifes.
The worlds that Roberts creates in oils are finely detailed enough to require a magnifying glass to fully appreciate: Even a small, uncomplicated still life of a vase of roses must be viewed carefully, to take in the shifts in color in each rose petal. He infuses all of his paintings with vitality and personality. They look so true-to-life that they could be considered painting in high definition.
However, they’re not entirely realistic, he said. He takes elements from different buildings and different people to create his own buildings and people. He removes ugly street elements like barriers and places buildings together that he’d like to see together. In one painting, “A Bend in the Road,” he actually changes the shape of the street to resemble something seen in a convex mirror. The process, even before painting begins, can take months. Most of the paintings in the show list multiyear creation dates.
“I would get an idea for a painting or a series of paintings. I go and spend hours and hours trying to figure out the best perspective. Then I would do drawings. Then I would spend days doing photographs, figuring out how people occupied the space,” he said. “Then I put that all together. It’s a lengthy process. It could take several months. I put different figures in a very choreographed way, trying to balance the actual figures with formal elements like color and space. After that, I would start painting.”
Roberts said he likes working on two at a time, one in his studio in New York and the other at his studio in Stonington.
Three of his pieces — “The Market in Union Square, Fall 2006” “Spring Morning, Trastevere” and “Old Fulton Landing: A Late Afternoon in Early June” — are extraordinary for their varying grades of light and shadow, as shown in the movement of the people across a sunny space. “Painting in many ways is the creation of light or forms revealed by light,” he said. The “Travastere” painting shows a piazza in Rome occupied by a bevy of intriguing pedestrians: two police officers, a smoking man reading a newspaper, a dog walker, two nuns, a couple. Every fold in their clothes reveals a different shade of color; every hair on heads reflects light in its own way.
The people that Roberts watches and photographs when creating his works are strangers. He doesn’t know their stories. So he doesn’t give them any stories.
“They’re not meant to be narrative,” Roberts said. “They’re meant to be resonant.”
“STONE ROBERTS: STREET SCENES, STILL LIFES AND FIGURES” will be at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., until Jan. 17. Information: nbmaa.org.
