Roaming Rogers simply must create

By Christina Licata

FOR THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 04.10.2009

As Billie Holiday moans in the background, Barbara Rogers picks up a paintbrush in her long, slender fingers and begins to stroke the canvas. • She starts at the edges, then moves toward the center, splashing color, painting lines. She isn't sure what she'll end up with; she doesn't stand back to look. • She does know this: She must paint.

Rogers, who has a solo show at Azora Gallery and has work included in the

current show at the Tucson Museum of Art, makes her home in Tucson but is known internationally for her color-embracing art.

In a sprawling interview at her Foothills home, stocked with her collection of shoes, treasures from the ocean and mounds of her paintings, Rogers sat down with the Star to talk about her life and her art.

In the beginning

Rogers, 71, grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. She was 2 when her family recognized her talent and gave her the tools to create art.

"Everyone made a big fuss over my drawings," said Rogers, sipping a cup of coffee in her remodeled kitchen loaded with pictures of her family and friends and knickknacks she's collected from her travels.

The encouragement was enough to have her see beyond the farm.

"I knew I wanted to leave Ohio," said Rogers.

"I didn't want to marry the football hero."

Nevertheless, marry was what she did right after receiving her degree from Ohio State.

"I graduated that morning, got married that afternoon and left for California that night," she recalled.

It was an exhilarating time. She barely knew the man she married and was now headed to a new city: San Francisco.

"It was the wildest time to go to California. The whole scene in the Bay Area was so

exciting I could barely stand it."

Rogers enrolled in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute, where her teachers were artistic legends Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. These famous artists, however, didn't pay attention to the women in the class.

"They couldn't talk. I needed someone to talk to me about painting."

She got her money back and went to the University of California-Berkeley instead.

"I got exactly what I wanted. I got to feel like a beginner. I got to learn like crazy."

Rogers won the Eisner Prize in Painting and received a Master of Arts degree in 1963.

At this point, she yearned to find her paradise and decided to move to New York.

"We took the money from the prize and bought a truck, a green pickup truck, and we drove to New York City." She was quickly hired to teach art in the North Port Public Schools on Long Island.

Every weekend, Rogers and her husband would travel into the city and stay at the Hotel Chelsea.

"I could be at the Metropolitan Museum for the entire day from the moment it opened until it closed, teaching myself about art."

Though she had hoped New York City would be a creative fountain for her, she soon realized that she hated the cold city streets in the winter and the heat that steamed off skyscrapers in the summer.

After a year, she moved back to California and taught at her alma mater.

Her technique and style

Rogers, who painted in the Abstract Expressionist style, remembers when that changed.

One afternoon, she glanced up and saw her husband.

"I got so interested in drawing him sipping a cup of coffee and sitting in front of a window," she recalled.

She realized things were going to be different.

"That painting made me so happy. I realized now that I was going to probably rebel and leave Abstract Expressionism and go to the figure."

Rogers used acrylic paint with an airbrush for her paintings. She recalls very few women working with that technique.

"I got into one show after another."

Her paintings, in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Chicago, sold.

In the early 1980s, she decided she wanted to go to Hawaii in search of new, tropical settings.

In 1982, Hurricane Iwa battered the island and thousands of homes were destroyed. Rogers had to be rescued from the house she was staying in. It was then that she realized she would have to once again change her painting style.

"I came back and I was really shaken. I knew I couldn't paint like this. I was in denial about how nature could kill you. I had to figure out how to work both the beauty and destruction into my paintings."

Rogers began a search for her artistic voice. She started a series of experiments with lithographs. She was teaching at the time and tried to be positive.

"The whole series of lithos kept me occupied. I taught my classes, worked on the prints and the whole time I'm terrified I've lost it."

Rogers knew she had to push her fears away. She decided to go back to Hawaii to photograph and collect debris from the hurricane.

After three trips to Hawaii, she returned home with a new outlook on painting.

She glued debris and pictures she took in Hawaii on canvases and started painting with the encaustic technique — hot wax with pigment added.

"My recent work is really still about the calm and the hysterical," Rogers said.

"I will often have a calm part to the painting and the hysterical part. The hysterical part for me is, don't assume the beauty and the calmness is going to last forever. It will eventually destruct."

Rogers found that combining beauty and rawness made her happy. She had found her voice.

Through her travels she picked up shapes, symbols to incorporate in her art.

One of the symbols she uses on many of her pieces is her version of a temple.

"I think when I was in Korea I saw that shape, and I continued to see it in Jakarta and Bali. It was a shape that kept coming up. To me they're like hands reaching up to the heavens asking that question: 'Why am I here?' "

Tucson

Rogers moved to Tucson in 1990 after accepting a position as a tenured professor at the University of Arizona.

"My life has been fabulous, and coming here (Tucson), who knew I would ever love this so much?"

Rogers had a passion for teaching and pushing her serious students toward success.

In May 2007, she retired to focus on painting and travel.

"I loved the students, but it's all the other stuff. Meetings, committees; there's so much more to teaching than working with the students."

Today she spends her days painting and enjoying her home.

"I get to spend my days in a templelike garden, and the god is nature."

At work

Rogers' home in Tucson is a modern-day oasis. Cacti and trees fill the 1-acre property. Inside, her house is a museum of the treasures she has collected in her travels — including paintings, Buddha statues and the dozen or so shoes she has collected from all over the world. Her studio is a converted garage. While it looks chaotic, all her paints and other art supplies are carefully labeled.

Rogers' primary colors are those you find in nature. Several of the pieces she is working on crowd the walls of her studio.

Her medium varies between oil and encaustic.

In some of her recent encaustic paintings, she uses a hair dryer to bleed the wax.

Her work ranges from $500 to close to $35,000.

As she paints, leaning over a waist-high table, she describes the process.

"I paint the whole surface and then block my favorite parts out. I then cover other places on the canvas with pieces of paper and roll paint on. I really don't have a plan when I start. My usual stuff is in my head (plants, temple forms), and the rest is organic."