1 - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Clean, translucent and of many hues,
these discarded arrow chips are fascinating
to everyone who sees them, and
when the Roberts family went in search
of arrowheads and agates, Nancy and
her grandmother invariably brought
home hundreds of these tiny rock fragments.
With supper over and the
ranch chores done, the arrow chips
gathered that day were spread on the
kitchen table and the family members
would finger and admire the neat little
flakes whose texture is so like fine
porcelain and whose colors seem to
embrace all the vivid and pastel blendings
of desert noons and nights.
Nancy's sandhill treasures one day
included a handful of bright yellow
chips, and when she and the family
were looking at them that evening, her
grandmother idly arranged these little
rock slivers into a crude sunflower,
with a round brown chip for a center
and two green leaves. Delighted with
the "flower" fashioned from her stones,
Nancy insisted that it be glued to a
piece of cardboard so that she might
keep it.
In that crude design made to please
a child, the artistic eye of Jo Roberts
glimpsed the germ of an idea and the
next day saw another "stone picture"
fashioned—a picture less crude than
the first.
Although her efforts continued to
improve with practice, Jo Roberts' artwork
remained essentially rough until
she found that the agate chips could be
shaped to her special requirements by
tooling their edges with a pair of ordinary
cotter-key pliers. With this discovery,
latent possibilities of the hobby
burst into full bloom, and no day held
so many hours that Jo couldn't have
filled them all with experiments she
wanted to try and pictures she hoped
to create.
In her first "Studies in Stone" of
professional quality, Jo arranged the
shaped agate chips into sprays of
mixed flowers which were affixed to
pastel-hued cardboard and plywood
foundations. Artistically and neatly
arranged, even these early efforts
gained for their maker several first
awards from the Nevada Fair of Industry
at Ely, and the Nevada State
Fair at Fallon. As her skill increased,
however, she found that not only the
main subject matter but also the full
background of the pictures could be
wrought in stone by pulverizing rock
of the proper tint and then sifting it
to assure uniformity.
After the desired design has been
pencil-sketched on canvas or plywood,
Mrs. Roberts—like any artist working
in more conventional media — begins
with the most distant part of the pic-
Great-Grandmother Roberts with some of her prize-winning Studies in Stone.
ture and moves forward, creating first
the sky, then clouds, distant mountains,
hills—and then the main subject
matter in the foreground. Taking each
section of the scene in its proper turn,
she coats that one area with a strong
quick-adhering glue, and over this surface
sprinkles the sifted rock powder.
Many of the sand grains, naturally, fall
beyond the boundaries in which they
are wanted, but by turning the picture
face down and tapping sharply with the
fingertips, all unattached grains are
shaken free and only the glue-coated
section remains covered. Soon as one
color is in place, glue is spread upon
another area and powdered rock of
a different tint or shading is applied.
Upon reaching the main subject matter
in the foreground, where minute
detail is important, Jo Roberts turns
to the agate chips, shaping each tiny
piece of stone to fill its individual
need, and fixing each individually in
place. When one considers that few
of these hand-shaped bits of agate are
larger than the head of a match, and
some no bigger than a pencil dot, the
limitless extent of this ranch woman's
patience and artistry becomes apparent.
Working as slowly as the mills of
the gods are reputed to grind, Mrs.
Roberts has created pictures of almost
every subject except human portraits.
One of her loveliest pictures, the sub-
AUGUST, 1957 25