Soon after Jim Robertson graduated from his Houston high school, he joined the Army and served our country for three years—two of those in Vietnam. After returning to the states, he earned a BFA from University of Houston and an MFA from University of Texas, Austin. His education and art career began in painting and drawing, and his works have been shown in numerous galleries and museums, including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While continuing to paint, his interests gradually turned toward three-dimensional works. In the early 1990s, he took metal working classes at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, welding at Lone Star College and began experimenting with steel and found metal objects. Robertson says, “I spent a lot of time cruising industrial salvage yards and had access to several dumpsters at metal fabrication shops.” His works are more or less figurative and evolve from one or two “starter” pieces, where he begins selecting or modifying more pieces to reinforce the original theme suggested by the starter piece. He says, “A few subjects reoccur in my work: surrealistic vehicles, fanciful weapons, animals and architectural structures.” Other works are conceived from scratch, without found objects—non-objective and more formal in nature—using readily available steel material. Robertson was a Professor of Art at Lone Star College for 29 years, retiring in 2009. He has a full-time art studio in Trinity and is often spotted cruising the art car scene in his stainless steel art creation, Jet Car. A True North 2022 artist with the bright teal monolithic sculpture “Zig Zag,” this year’s work "Sanctuary" is an architectural mashup of Egyptian pyramids, Gothic pointed arches and minarets.