Tommy Roberts awakens in his Towson apartment and begins to sketch the day. He does this in graphite pencil and charcoal and pastel, in water colors and oil and acrylics. He does it in a style he describes as realistic with touches of Impressionism. And he does it from the wheelchair he has ridden for most of his 48 years.
The muscular dystrophy attacked when he was 9 years old. There were doctors who told Roberts’ mother that he probably wouldn’t live to be 30. Roberts learned this long after he’d passed that age and was making a living with his marvelous portraits.
Now he’s a nationally known artist whose work routinely sells for thousands of dollars and covers a wide range of subjects: neighborhood kids on a front stoop; thoroughbred horses heading down the home stretch; ballerinas; cherry blossoms; Billie Holiday and Nina Simone; Thelonious Monk and Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra.
He had some of it displayed last weekend at the annual Artscape festivities, where people gathered to watch him work. There is always a sense of magic when life starts to appear on a previously blank slate. And Roberts has been working his magic since he was a child who watched other children romping in the street while his own body began its long rebellion.
“I think I always had that instinct for art,” he was saying the other day. “It started in kindergarten, when they introduced us to cut-and-paste. I was enjoying it. Then my mother bought one of those old watercolor sets, with the splotches of primary colors.
“I’d sit around the house painting. I’d go outside and paint. I’d draw cartoons of Marvel Comics characters and the Fantastic Four on TV.”
He relates this now with a sense of distance from his earlier self — the one watching his friends go off to play while “I didn’t know what was happening to me — just that I was getting weaker and losing my ability to keep up with the other kids.”
He was in a wheelchair by 10, and needed help to get dressed. The doctors gave his mother the grim prognosis — an early demise — but later diagnosed a less severe form of the disease. Today, Roberts uses a wheelchair and doesn’t have full use of his arms, but he says he feels good.
“In a way,” he says, “I think the sickness made me a better artist. It gave me an outlet. It was something that I thought I was pretty good at, and the more I worked at it, the more my confidence went up. I was real shy, and I couldn’t keep up with the other kids, so this gave me a form of self-expression. It became my world.”
He went to the William S. Baer School, where most of the students have severe disabilities and health impairments, and he found art — and an emotional support system with his classmates.
“We were a brotherhood,” he says. “We were positive guys who fed each other’s spirits, lifted each other up. You know, some people say, ‘You can’t do this,’ or ‘You can’t do that.’ We ignored it. We tried to think positive. And we had some faculty who gave us the confidence.”
More than 30 years later, Roberts’ face still lights up when he talks about some of those people: an art teacher, Catherine Jones, and a guidance counselor, John Strama, who looked after him and helped him win a scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art.
“A big confidence builder, going to the Maryland Institute,” he says. “That’s where I really learned the fundamentals.”
The school also introduced him to a world wider than the one he’d known growing up on Cecil Avenue, near the old Kirk Field.
“You learn to think beyond a neighborhood or a city,” he says, “to a whole universe. You think about culture, about God, about how beautiful the Earth is.”
Now he’s also thinking about a new medium. He’s working with Natasha Harris on a children’s coloring book about Barack Obama.
Harris is doing the writing. It’s more inspirational than political, about Obama’s childhood, his years being raised by his grandparents, his schooling.
Roberts is also teaching basic drawing this summer to youngsters 10 to 16 at Essex Community College, and teaching at the Bright Starts after-school program at the Baltimore Recreation Center.
He’s bringing his sense of art to these kids — and also a sense of a remarkable man whose body began to fail him years ago, but whose skill and spirit never did.
