Biography                  

Rita Roberts was born in McCook, Nebraska in 1964 (as Rita Doyle). At four years old, she declared that she would be an artist when she grew up.

Roberts studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Kansas City Art Institute. She majored in illustration and acquired a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from KCAI in 1987. She gained experience as an illustrator and art director at a printing company in Kansas City . Roberts worked with clients such as Wal-mart and Coca-Cola, doing everything from concept presentations to darkroom films. 

Her goal, always, was to paint and in 1991 Roberts left her design job and began painting full time. She started with plein air watercolors and pastel paintings of southwest Nebraska. The following November Roberts had her first solo show. In six months she had not only finished 30 pieces but had also built every frame from scrap lumber salvaged from her sister’s farm. 

In 1993 Roberts moved to Weaverville, California and began using reference photos taken on backpacking trips in the Trinity Alps. With at least one solo show each year, the artist honed her watercolor skills and a demand developed for her instruction at workshops.

Roberts devotion to oils began in 1996. She was drawn to the concept of painting entirely with a palette knife using no brushes or solvents.  Roberts found her own niche with this method of painting. After discovering the richness of Venetian red gesso, she now uses the texture of the canvas and the red ground as much as the applied paint to achieve the effect of light on the landscape. Unique to Roberts’ knife paintings is the thin application of paint and occasionally complicated subject matter rendered with tenacious accuracy. Roberts’ paintings hold a quiet moodiness not usually seen with this technique. 

Roberts work has been featured in Southwest Art magazine and The Artists’ Magazine in which she won second place for the landscape category of the 2004 art competition and was a finalist in 2001 and 2005. She is a signature member of Oil Painters of America.  Her work was in the Salon International 2002, 2004 and 2005 at the Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art and has been a part of the Top 200 of the Arts for the Parks Competition. 

Roberts now lives in Monte Vista, Colorado. She is represented by The Peterson Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Firedworks Gallery in Alamosa, Colorado and Angler Art in Denver, Colorado.