Joe Roberts – författare

Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedi family in Bangalore, while travelling all over southern India. In Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholic divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the great temple at Madurai, watched the snakeboat races at Arunmala, stayed with Syriac Christians at Cochin and was offered heroin in the Jewish cemetery. Wherever he went he met extraordinary people, but these encounters take second place to his ripening friendship with the Trivedi family, and his exact chronicling of their neighbours. As Major Trivedi warned him nothing is as fixed as you think . Three Quarters of a Footprint has long fascinated readers with its gentle, perceptive humour, chilled occasionally by a shadow of menace, as if the spirit and wit of R K Narayan had been reborn in an Englishman.

Artist Joe Roberts has spent more than a decade honing a deeply unique and unapologetically hallucinogenic style of art. Through paintings, drawings and mixed-media works, Roberts navigates a world of cosmic imagery, pop cultural detritus, and shifting geometric forms, bringing to life both the creeping unease and the uncanny humor of the psychedelic experience. Collecting over 100 new and recent works along with an introduction by Hamilton Morris (Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia), We Ate the Acid is the latest product of Roberts’ visionary journeys and a testament to his expansive, singular imagination.

The paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works of Joe Roberts are transportive in the cosmic sense. Through their intuitive blend of styles and subjects, they serve as portals into a welcomingly hallucinatory world: a place where gleeful mashups of childhood signifiers (comic book detritus, cartoon mascots) exist cozily alongside countercultural reference points (ouija boards, sci-fi paperbacks, UFOs) and earnest flashes of the personal (diaristic sketches, confessional trip reports). Reissued for the first time since 2015, LSD Worldpeace documents the extraordinary creativity and scrappy methods of Roberts’s early career, replete with collages, action figures, and dioramas, in addition to the paintings for which he’s become so celebrated. With introductory texts by Myla DalBesio and Matthew Ronay, LSD Worldpeace is the product of a wildly imaginative artist moving freely between modes, guided by a boundless vision.