I believe that a painting is at its best visually when it produces its own light. I feel a painting is effective if it is seductive in its presence and it remains haunting in memory. I hope that these three theories on effective painting are embodied in my current work.

I am interested in exploring the cultural signifiers through art that connect to spiritual and African-American traditions. I’m intrigued with the notion that symbols which are designed to be haunting can be used to express abstract ideas such as dualism, good and evil, hope and despair. It is through symbols that the sacred is spoken of in secular terms.
 

My installations and paintings are intended to resemble relics salvaged from the fires of intolerance that destroyed African-American houses of worship in 1996. The works are metaphors for the Church, a safe place both physically and spiritually. Every living thing seeks a safe place or the life form is nurtured by it. Equivalents of a sanctuary in Nature are seed pod, shell, bulb, cocoon, and sac. Even in death our concepts of a safe place live on, i.e. the Light and Heaven. These amazing hosts are sources of my inspirations and motifs for the current Cross Sections Series.

Cross Sections consists of 12 mixed-media pieces with remarkable presence. Most of the 6-foot-high works include broken tempered glass, resins, and luminous acrylic grounds that cause them to glow in the dark and give them an eerie depth and sense of mystery when the lights are on. Conceived as metaphors for the African-American houses of worship that were destroyed by fire in 1996, these works evoke both danger and safety, holiness and destruction. Although they are approximately human-sized, the works appear massive, whether hanging on the wall or set up on small stands, like altars. With titles like "Cross Rose," "Inner Shell," and "Seed Pod," they reference the natural world as well as that of human understanding and culture.

The sheer size and shape of the works make a nearly sculptural statement. However, the dense, intricate, collaged and painted surfaces reward the careful viewer with surprises such as tiny, colorful glass beads, and pieces of seashell, sliced to reveal their inner structure. Some areas look like brick that has been scorched with smoke. Others reveal a structure of lathes, as though a building had been reduced to its internal elements. In other sections, the dark paint is crackled, revealing bright veins of pink or blue or yellow, tokens of memory and of hope.

Robert Peppers is an accomplished painter whose works have been exhibited widely in the United States and England for many years. Currently Associate Professor at the Ohio University School of Art in Athens, Ohio, he began teaching at the Center for African American Studies at the same university in 1979, and was the Assistant Director of the Black Cultural Center at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana from 1980 to 1989. In recent summers, he has taught drawing at Penland School of Crafts, and collage and painting in the O.U. Art in Great Britain program based at King’s College and the University of London, England.