Featured Artist of the month

Each month we feature one artist from our Community Artists page here on our website, in our monthly newsletter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. We will also host an artist’s talk with them over Zoom so our audience can get to know them better. Check back at the beginning of each month for a new artist to learn about. And view artists from past months here.

December 2024: Alan Roberts

We are thrilled to end 2024 with a very special Featured Artist of the Month, Alan Roberts! Read on to learn about Alan, read his artist-teacher statement, and see a selection of his artwork. Watch the recording of Alan’s artist’s talk — which took place on Zoom Monday, December 16th at 12:30 PM Eastern Time — on our YouTube channel by following this link.

About the Artist

Born and raised in North Carolina and South Carolina, Alan Roberts traveled to Europe for a one-month visit in 1974. First astonished by the beauty of the European architecture and its unity with the surrounding landscape, he then serendipitously met the former director of the Leo Marchutz School, William Weyman, whose unique teaching methods inspired Roberts to enroll in the art school in Aix-en-Provence as a novice painter in 1975. He was taught that an intensive study of the laws of organic wholeness and their repeated affirmation in the works of all great art could lead him towards his own unique vision. Roberts began teaching art history in 1982 and became Director of the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing, alongside John Gasparach, in 1990. Alan continues to teach drawing, painting, and aesthetics at the school.

His international exhibition record includes the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence as well as galleries in the U.S. and France. He has exhibited with such artists as Romare Bearden, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Wolfe Kahn, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, and Paul Cézanne. He has also collaborated on several important books concerning the art of Leo Marchutz and his students. Alan has a BS in Psychology from the University of South Carolina and an MFA from The Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Artist-Teacher Statement

When I first arrived in Aix-en-Provence, I was 23 years old. I was traveling through Europe with my guitar and friends, with a Cat Stevens concert in Tunisia as our ultimate destination. Little did I know that it was another artist who would change the course of my life.

I would eventually sit in front of that artist, Leo Marchutz, for my first critique. I will never forget it. After dragging thirty of my first attempts at painting in front of him, waiting for him to discuss every stroke, he simply said after a while, “You have a good feeling for the relationship between warm and cool colors in your painting. You will have no problems except for the ones that all painters struggle with. Keep working.” I walked away, confused at first, thinking, “That’s it? After all that work!” But slowly, I came to realize the magnitude of that simple relationship – in fact, I discovered that the light of Provence is so unique, especially because of its warm-cool relationship and that all great paintings parallel this simple but profound concept. I knew after a few days that the simplicity, humility, and gentle nature of this man was combined with a depth of knowledge and a tenacious drive for simplicity and purity. Each of his simple words and phrases were always imbued with profound consequences. I have spent my life contemplating his teaching and giving it to others.

Leo was a Jewish artist from Nuremberg, who also came to Aix in 1928 with no intention of living there. He simply wanted to see where his master, Paul Cézanne, had painted. But upon arrival, he serendipitously met Cézanne’s former coachman who drove Leo straight to the Chateaunoir. Leo Marchutz would live there for the next forty years. Because of that, I would also live and work there…

My trip to Europe in the summer of 1974 was to be a one-month hiatus from my intensive year teaching in an elementary school in Greenville, N.C. but the real goal was to eventually end up in Tunisia at a Cat Stevens concert … I never made it.

I came to Aix in Fall 1974 to see Nanette, my best friend from home, and her brother David. I knew David as a sweet, shy, hippie-child artist from Union, S.C. who had decided to take a leap with his big sister and enroll in a small art school in Aix-en-Provence. David invited me to hitchhike down from Frankfurt for a visit. I arrived at the dilapidated house on the river in Aix and walked in. There he was with the entire cohort sitting around the wood stove, reading. David??? Reading??? War and Peace??? Out-loud??? With others??? I knew something was afoot.

The next morning they prepared their gear to go painting. “Hey, what do I do while I wait?” I asked. Someone said, “You take this stuff and go under that tree, sit down and paint what you see. Use the end with the bristles to put the paint on the paper, not the pointy wooden end. Bye.” This was the first time I had thought about painting, and I hadn’t really thought that much about art. I was a psychology major. But something happened in those few days in Aix and I did think long and hard about that experience.

A few months later I decided to return to Aix-en-Provence and enroll as a student in the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing. The teachers would eventually tell me I could use the pointy end of the brush if I wanted … the main thing was to honestly express relationships that I saw happening before my eyes. My technique would always grow out of that. Slowly, I began to realize who these teachers were, and what they were trying to instill in the students that came into their orbit. Leo Marchutz — a quiet, fiercely principled man — was a renowned Cézanne scholar who spent most of his life at the Chateaunoir, and eventually produced an astonishingly contemporary and original oeuvre that also embodied the principles that Cézanne and Leo’s other beloved artists so adamantly insisted upon. His assistants, William Weyman and Sam Bjorklund, taught me how to study the great artists of the past without prejudice. John Gasparach, now my colleague of nearly 50 years, taught me what to read and even how to read anything which could help me in my painting, in my thinking. Together John and I would grow the school, and a team of women and men would concretize and develop a faculty rich in experiences and differing viewpoints from which to contemplate these principles.

I would be given the opportunity to live at the renowned Chateaunoir for thirteen years. I have continued to have my personal studio there and to walk in its ancient forests since 1978.

Eventually, I would be taught not only how to paint, but also how and what to teach — the investigation of that mysterious, whole nature of a work of art, and the implications arising from our face-to-face encounter with it.

I have spent fifty years at the Marchutz School, painting from the world around me, reading, dialoguing, and sitting with others for hours in front of any given chef-oeuvre in any particular museum … what did that artist have in mind when they conceived their work? How did they make a world different but parallel to the world in which they lived and breathed? How did Rembrandt do it? How did the Greeks do it? How did Berthe Morisot do it? How did Giacometti do it? Do they have anything in common? Do their works have something I want in my work, something I want in my life?

I have learned so much … I have been given so much.

To inform and enhance what I have been given, I have been taught to pass it on. To have the great artists on one side of me and intelligent, committed, gifted, or gritty young students on the other, all in a town that is itself a work of art, is a blessing.

The Leo Marchutz School is about connecting the inside (one’s core) with the outside (one’s environment). When the connection happens a special kind of outcome can occur, and that outcome … is called art. Where there is art there is self-actualization, recognition, painful struggle, and sometimes even joy. Situated in the splendid light of Provence, the school is a vehicle, a space in which I and the students can practice a daily habit — a habit of expressing what we see and how we see it. Then, we can compare and contrast what we have seen with what the great artists of the past have seen. It is a place to connect the sensing with the knowing, the temporal with the timeless — a connection that needs to be preserved and cherished in our world today.

- Alan Roberts