Well-known Asheville art critic and painter, Robert Godfrey wrote the following to accompany and exhibition of Joe's prints which Godfrey curated for Semi-Public: A Space for Contemporary Art in Asheville, NC in October, 2002.

Joe Chris Robertson was a painter and a printmaker and one who transcended art media in much thee same manners Matisse and Picasso. These artists were neither single-media bound nor were they held hostage by the traditional technical aspects of the particular media in which they found themselves working at any given time. (Matisse the painter was also Matisse the draughtsman, Matisse the printmaker, Matisse the sculptor, and above all, Matisse the maker of art.) Matisse and Picasso among others, including Robertson, obtained an aesthetic control over technique in order to drive home their respective visions and personal points of view no matter what they picked up in the studio to work on. Robertson, like Mattise and Picasso, was at all times in the proverbial driver's seat; media techniques were to be learned and then discarded or overtaken as the artistic impulses demanded. If anything remained constant as Robertson switched media, from painting to printmaking and back again, it was his employment of drawing. In fact, it was drawing that enabled, informed and charged these artists as to the tenor of their respective media.

Joe Robertson studied painting philosophy in his native state of Arkansas (University of Arkansas) but it was at the University of Iowa, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1950, that he learned his intaglio processes, especially soft ground etching, under the tutlage of the well regarded teacher and printmaker, Mauricio Lansanky. As Robertson's work matured from the 1960's on, it was driven, as he has acknowledged, by sensation, nuance, and knowledge but resolved through his deep understanding of and trust in drawing. It was also during this time that Robertson, himself, became and excellent teacher, developing (as the first chair) the art department at Mars Hill College, a small liberal arts institution near Asheville, North Carolina.

J.C. Robertson was an extremely inquisitive individual with what may be called, a hyperactive mind. His prints were worked from life, worked from sketchbooks, and worked from his head and memory. He sometimes made references to other artists' work, he commented on the current social (B.P. or BP Caucus) and political (Requiem for a Student) issues of his time, he made reference to history (Tut's Tomb) and literature (Under the Volcano), and he toyed with style; some work was extremely literal (Ben Shawn influenced) and others dominated by almost pure shape (hints of Robert Motherwell). When he was teaching -- in the classroom or giving examinations -- he wrote poetry, free verse that pulled in immediate responses and remembrances; sometimes it filtered into his studio work. Robertson was an indulger, someone who investigated things inside and outside his matrix -- he also made clocks and harpsichords. The French would have called him "bricoleur". It is drawing that can separate the special artist and the pedestrian one. For Robertson the nuance, a element capable of being extracted and abstracted from the drawing mark, is what often crept into his work and when it did, he and "it" took control -- through line (Der Blue Max), gesture (Odalisque), shape (The Warrior and Frog Egg series), and tone became the perfect marriage in which for him to experiment and the resolve his narrative and formal issues. His plates became malleable picture planes capable of mutations, changes and manipulation. He was less interested in the print edition than in the individual 'drawing' or what he could extract from the particular plate. There are prints in which the rich and dense blacks take control and other prints from the same plates where color is overlaid and nuances are veiled as shape (Species Virginiana or Warrior II). Other form elements he played around with included left-to-right horizontal balance (Four Graces). Plates would be reworked and re-etched as well, sometimes over long periods of time. Many pulls were not signed and few prints were ever dated. In a sense Robertson's total oeuvre was a work in progress.

As an artist born in 1922 and trained in the 1940s and 50s in the South and Midwest, J.C. Robertson was introduced to both the European and American modernists responding to form, stream of consciousness and surrealism and the indigenous American realists with an illustrative response to social and political surroundings. His work is a blend of these two forces. But his understanding of form, which springs from Western European roots dominate as visual elements and tend to subdue the regional or American tendencies in his imagery. It is Robetson's knowledge, empathy, and employment of drawing (and inks) into these prints that bring in the poetry and verve. Because he philosophically and artistically supported issues of social and political justice, his prints also emit a certain and strong humanity. His position can be seen as that of a moral eclectic. And that is not a bad place to be. Joe Chris Robertson made work from the 1940s to 1992, when a debilitating stroke ended his career. He died in 2000.