Portrait of D.W. A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

In Stephen Roberts painting Portrait of D.W.-recently acquired by the museum of Nebraska Art-the head and shoulders of an African-American woman rest against a background of white space. The wear of life, the gaze of the worldly-wise looks off beyond us. This image requires our complex understanding of beauty, a beauty that encompasses dignity, repose, vulnerability and wariness.

As we understand the world through her eyes, there is no compromise with reality, with life as we understand it. Robert's super-realist style underscores the real with delicate, sure renderings of the subject's physical anatomy, including blemishes: two pale slivers of lighter skin falling from her shoulders, the lines of a bra strap; the gathering of reddish capillaries on her chest; the artery sloping over the crescent wrinkle in her chin. As we move back from the painting, these physical features blur uncannily as they would were she alive in front of us.

This virtuoso realist technique adds weight to our size-up of her character. There is individuality here, bolstered by the basic facts of anatomical correctness. Artist Steve Robert's comments on his work underscore this: "When I paint and draw the figure, I use real people. They are always portraits of actual people. In my work I want to have a connectedness between the people and places I paint, me, and the people viewing my paintings or drawings, and in the middle of all that, I want some kind of feeling, a mood that is transferred, hopefully of some meaning or value."

A portrait like this, exquisite with common understandings of the true nature of things, requires a communion between the work of art and us. This contemplation of our humanity with its attendant reminders of both the comforting and the troubling can be, at its most illuminating, a part of our search for the sacred, a search nurtured by art. A simple, dignified, face resonates with life, its burnt offerings as well as its satisfactions--an icon, a reminder of the power of art to enlarge our humanity.