The figurative work I create is a layered combination of rural aesthetics, queer historical references, inherited ephemera, and personal imagery. Painting allows me to tangibly imagine queer futures while honoring a queer past by permitting these stories to coexist within one plane. As I ruminate on the interplay between these employed elements, I am cementing endangered histories and generating utopias.

My upbringing was largely bedecked by iconic Americana artists, such as Norman Rockwell and Terry Redlin, who inform my visual predilections. I look to artists like Grant Wood and J.C. Leyendecker as primary historical influences, and I consider my work to be in conversation with contemporaries such as Jacob Todd Broussard, Jordan Ramsey Ismaiel, Matt Lifson, and Pacifico Silano. Research into my uncle and namesake, Martin Ross McRoberts, has become a primary contextual influence, as well as a direct link to an increasingly fading queer past.