Seeing Is Believing With Artist Joe Roberts
AKA LSD World Peace

Though Eastman and Laird’s creation began as an underground, black and white satire of superhero comic books and 1980s America’s inexplicable obsession with ninjas, it quickly became the very thing it was lampooning. Stripped of their subtext, The Ninja Turtles comic book was a way of selling people the Ninja Turtles movie, which was a way of selling people the Ninja Turtles cartoon, which sold Ninja Turtles toys, which in turn sold different comic books based on the toys. Each time, new layers of personal meaning tangled up with nostalgia are constantly generated.

In 2011, the San Francisco-based artist Joe Roberts, who goes by the pseudonym LSD World Peace, made two painted portraits of the Ninja Turtles Donatello and Raphael. The paintings are almost identical, other than the different colored bandanas and a couple other small markings. Each Turtle is staring back at us, tongues with acid tabs on them poking through toothless grinning mouths. Their eyes are not their eyes, but are instead those classic alien drawings—you know the ones: heads like elongated guitar picks, yawning black eyes that look like staring into an unknowable void, pinprick dots to represent nostrils. In this case, the aliens’ foreheads feature the lightning bolt from the Grateful Dead’s iconic Steal Your Face logo. It’s jarring to look at these images and be overcome by a weird mix of nostalgia and nervousness that evokes that precise childhood moment when the world opens itself up and things start to feel terrifying and exciting in equal measure. It’s a revelation, because it shows how popular culture engrains itself in our collective psyche, and how it aids—or in some case prohibits—our growth as human beings.

Roberts, 44, has been making art for pretty much as long as he can remember, is no stranger to how the personal weight of pop culture can imbue new meaning onto two dimensional icons, and his work is a constant effort to create a world within a world with its own talismans and a language built on using accumulated history to better understand his surroundings. His understanding of art began with his grandfather, who lived in Racine, Wisconsin, but it wouldn’t be quite right to say that his grandfather taught him art, so much as his grandfather taught him to love the concept of creation. “I think he was a machinist or something like that,” Roberts says. “He retired and wanted to go to school. The story I’ve always been told is that he couldn’t take all the classes he wanted to take, and he saw a figure drawing class and got super into drawing and he just never left school. He just became the old dude on campus making art.”

Roberts would visit him at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he had access to unlimited art supplies—paints, clay, whatever. At home, his father, a big comic book fan, exposed him to the work of legendary artists like Jack Kirby, whose bombastic style shaped the collective understanding of the American superhero, as filtered through a concoction of wonky science fiction ideas and earthy lines. Roberts doesn’t say it outright, but part of his art is indelibly connected to Kirby’s obsession with ideas: each illustration was an invention, a new world worth exploring. Also like Kirby, Roberts builds his worlds through accumulation. Characters and symbols repeat, and take on new depth and meaning the further they get from their original source. One could argue that this is what most artists do—endlessly iterate on ideas and themes, until those themes warp into more personal (and occasionally inscrutable) terrain, but there’s a directness to Roberts’ work that outsider artists tend to be masters of. When you look at an individual LSD World Peace piece, what you’re seeing is exactly what you’re seeing. In composition, the paintings often take the form of an altar, honoring the ritual of psychedelic use through the intrinsically linked ritual of art creation.

Roberts’ interest in art grew beyond his grandfather’s influence when he was a teenager and got into skateboarding and graffiti, which “went hand-in-hand at the time.” It’s this world that explains his ultimate artistic genesis, in a way. Roberts’ paintings are, loosely, outsider art. But Roberts isn’t necessarily an outsider. His style, made up of purposefully crude lines, a childlike sense of wonder, and a mystical approach to perspective, feels as if it comes from the tradition of what is now a robust subgenre filled with brilliant minds who exist on the margins.

In either 1997 or 1998, Roberts moved to San Francisco. “I can’t figure it out exactly. My math never seems to add up. I didn’t have a plan. I was so dumb,” he says. “I had like 200 bucks, a backpack, and a skateboard, but I sorted it out pretty quick. I got lucky. I got two jobs, but I got fired from the first one the first day. I went across the street and got a job at a smoothie place. And then I became, like, the Assistant Manager because I was probably the oldest person working there. It wasn't like I was really good at it,”

Roberts spent his spare time endlessly drawing in his sketchbook.The tech boom had not yet fully thrashed the city, so he was able to focus on his art while also exploring his other interests: psychedelics, mind expansion, and the pursuit of personal truth. He also branched out from drawing—making anthropomorphic action figures out of cardboard that came with tiny bottles of Jack Daniels, dime bags, lighters, razor blades and more. They mostly look like they’re a product of an alternate world where instead of becoming an iconic children’s cartoon, the Ninja Turtles branched out into drugs and sketchy decisions. “I was at the point in my life where I was thinking of selling those on the street,” he says. “I was really poor and I didn’t have much else going on.”

If you’re of a certain age, an image of Roberts is probably starting to take shape: a guy making counter-cultural art in a city that was, at times, known as an artistic mecca. Then you probably imagine a head shop, maybe a wisp of Nag Champa floating across a series of blacklight posters. This is an understandable place for your brain to go, but the reality is a bit less sensational.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Roberts was already devising ways to stay home more often. “I hide out. I have a dog and girlfriend,” he says. “I don’t go to art openings. If I have a show, I try not to even go to my own opening. One day I just realized I just didn’t want to deal with people anymore. I don’t know what happened.” Despite his relative reclusiveness, and despite the fact that the world has recalibrated to welcome antisocial behavior, Roberts is not hard to track down. Up until recently, a huge chunk of his artwork was available on his Instagram account. He’s been interviewed in magazines like GQ. But these moments are like flares from an alternate world far more colorful and mesmerizing than our own.

Roberts’ work is easy to see once you know to look for it, but it feels otherwise invisible, half-forgotten by everyone except the people who are continuously drawn to it. Though he has a complicated relationship with social media (he’s deleted his Instagram account at least once, and according to his current profile, plans to do so again on January 3, 2021), it has also helped a cult form around his work. His paintings, as intricate and tactile as they may be, tend to translate very well to social media, their imperfections a reminder that behind each of those digital squares is a real piece of artwork that can be touched.

My own introduction to his work came when I was interviewing the musician and artist Brian DeGraw of the band Gang Gang Dance for a magazine in 2013. I went to his house in Woodstock, and we talked while listening to John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass. While he was showing me a stack of Dash Snow originals, I became enamored of what appeared to be an action figure tacked up on his wall in a crude plastic bag with a cardboard top. The figure was one of the ones that Roberts had made. I was fascinated by the way the character at once evoked the shadowy, borderline comical world of bootleg toys, the weird fringe punkiness of so much 80s children’s television, the jagged lines of underground artist and Pee Wee’s Playhouse designer Gary Panter, and the general sense that amazing work can happen in pretty much any environment, as long as people aren’t really paying attention. It felt like both an acknowledgement and a subversion of multiple decades of pop culture.

After that, Roberts’ work started popping up in places I wasn’t expecting. A UK-based clothing company called African Apparel teamed with Roberts for a shirt. (Their most famous shirt was briefly ubiquitous, and is often imitated: It was a picture of Jimi Hendrix with BOB MARLEY written over the top in huge text.) On the shirt made with Roberts, where a pocket would normally go, was an interpretation of Mickey Mouse—or a rodent that looks like a skinny, completely blazed version of Mickey—drawn over the face of a clock, his hands pointing to 11 and 1. On the back, depicted in grey pencil, that same rodent appears to be talking to his twin, saying “THE VISION IS ALL YOURS YOU ARE INFINITY YOU CAN SEE IT ALL IF YOU WANT.”

When Roberts asks me how I initially came across his work, I mention the shirt, and how I loved it, but grew out of it and gave it away. A month or so later, a package arrives in my mailbox. It’s a scrap of paper, torn at the sides, with the original version of the drawing from the shirt. Receiving it during the COVID-19 pandemic felt like a lifeline to an existence that extended past my front yard.

The next time Roberts and I talk, we discuss Philip K. Dick and God. Roberts had been spending his time putting together work for a show called The Return of King Felix at Tony Cox’s New York gallery Club Rhubarb. It’s sort of based off of Dick’s confounding, late-period novel VALIS, which Roberts had been reading while in quarantine. VALIS is concerned with visions that Dick experienced while under the influence of psychedelics. It’s a somewhat autobiographical novel that attempts to document Dick’s search for god (VALIS is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), and the enlightenment that came from that search. The appendix of the book documents some of Dick’s revelations, including observations of a cypher consisting of two words: KING FELIX. Dick writes that, “the two word cypher signal KING FELIX was not intended for human beings but for the descendents of Ikhnaton, the three-eyed race which, in secret, exists with us.”

The Return of King Felix is recognizably the work of Roberts, but it feels more intricate and fleshed out. Pieces use brighter colors, swaths of black shadow cut across mossy green trees, vibrant smiley faces stack and tumble in formation around rainbow-mountains, the long light of early evening casts itself over seemingly mundane still-lifes accented by odd details like ninja stars. “I was thinking about the tree of life, and about plants absorbing energy and time traveling and portals and stuff,” Roberts says. “I’ve been extra good at paying attention to light. Paying attention to the hours of the sun instead of the hours of the clock. There’s no rush anymore.”

In 2017, Roberts appeared in a segment of the Vice TV show Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia. You can find it on YouTube under the headline WHAT IT’S LIKE TO MAKE ART ON DMT. In describing how his art is sometimes acting as a series of notes for his DMT experiences, Roberts gives a lot of good information about a drug that purportedly brings you close to how it feels to die. The clip is odd: it initially paints him as a more out-there guy than he actually is, but then you take a step back and realize that he’s attempting to document the undocumentable. How do you convey what you see, when what you see has no bearing in reality?

In the clip, he says. “It’s always something kinda like, I don’t know if I should be looking over there anyways, there’s some cooler shit over here that is probably not going to, like, scare me, because there is weird shit in there.” Roberts is describing a hallucination that involved a series of hallways with doors that he saw while on DMT. The clip features some light animation of Roberts’ drawings, but it’s not really needed. His explanation is startlingly vivid to the point that the architecture begins to materialize. The rooms become imaginable.
In a sense, Roberts is an explorer of the hallucinatory, mapping his trips like wonked out, extremely subjective cartography. His work has changed a lot since that video, but his dedication to transcribing his own porous perceptions of unreality has remained. The portals are open.

Sam Hockley-Smith is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in The FADER, The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, Vulture, and more.