Will Roberts (born 1977) is a contemporary British painter who lives and works in the UK.
Roberts’ current practice centres on landscape painting and the quiet role images play within domestic spaces. His work explores the paintings people grow up around or live beside for years without fully noticing anymore — the landscape above the fireplace, the picture halfway up the stairs, or the painting that has always been there despite its story becoming unclear through time. He is interested in how these objects absorb memory, familiarity and emotional significance, becoming embedded within the atmosphere of everyday life.
Working without photographs or direct source material, Roberts creates imagined landscapes that emerge through intuition, repetition and the physical process of painting. These works are not representations of specific places but constructed images built from memory and association. He describes them as “False Objects” — paintings that feel inherited or remembered despite never having existed before. Occupying a parallel space between recognition and invention, they suggest a shared visual memory while remaining entirely original.
Landscape functions as both subject and framework within Roberts’ practice. Drawn to its enduring place within the home, he explores how paintings operate quietly in the background of daily life while continuing to shape our relationship to space and memory.
Text embedded within the works extends this fiction, using titles and phrases that imply a domestic history — as though the paintings have already been lived with, referred to casually, passed between homes, or remembered imperfectly.
Central to Roberts’ practice is oil paint and its slower, accumulative process. Through textured surfaces and simple framing, each painting becomes a complete object: something made not simply to be viewed, but to exist within lived space.
