Joe Roberts is fuzzy on the details, but there was a time when tripping on acid, DMT, or mushrooms felt as routine as a visit to the grocery store. 

But in recent years, Roberts, 47, has largely outgrown psychedelics. In fact, the artist says, he hasn’t tripped in three months. These days, his inspiration comes more from his 2-year-old son, Ocean, than from the world of hallucinogens.

Heavily entwined with San Francisco’s underground skate, punk rock, and graffiti scenes in the early 2000s, Roberts has developed something of a cult following with his psychedelic landscape and still life paintings.

Roberts’ designs have been featured on fashion lines from Supreme and the local hill-bombing crew GX1000. Just this week, his work adorned the cover of Father John Misty’s new single. Roberts is also set to paint a mural for Thrasher’s new Haight Street store, opening this fall. 

As his work has breached popular culture in the last several years, the mythology around him has grown. 

“A lot of these kids got obsessed with that book” — Roberts’ monograph “61)A3HT3TA3W,” or “We Ate the Acid” backward — “and they’re looking at him as this strange Ram Dass character,” said gallerist and ex-pro skater Tony Cox. “This mystique only made people even more obsessed. Even people who don’t like or understand art — it’s a universal language.”

Based in San Francisco’s foggy Outer Sunset, Roberts has been celebrated locally and internationally for his uncanny work that takes viewers back to their elementary-school art class via a heroic dose. A champion of San Francisco, his work brings together themes of spirituality, the occult, and fantasy, tying pop culture with ancient symbolism and personal motifs from comic books to native imagery. 

Technicolor dungeons that look born from a drug-induced fever dream are venues for cartoon bedlam — think Hieronymus Bosch, but with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Grateful Dead’s “steal your face” replacing twisted sprites and tarots.

Looking at his work, it’s hard to tell if you’re being hypnotized, proselytized, or dosed. 

Soft-spoken, with a puckish charm, Roberts has curtains of ink-black hair framing a face frozen in an expression as if he’s just seen a ghost. Given his work, maybe he has. His baggy skater clothing is time-stamped with variously colored paints he’s been buying from the nonprofit Precita Eyes Muralists since he moved to the Mission in the late 1990s. 

Growing up in Milwaukee’s urban core, Roberts gained an interest in the obscure and strange from his grandfather, the artist Steve Vasy, who made sculptures, drawings, collages, and paintings from found objects and homemade materials. 

“They’re all made of junk,” Vasy told the Milwaukee Journal in a 1989 interview. “It’s cheap. You’re talking to a cheapie.”

Despite making art casually in his youth, Roberts was disillusioned with the idea of college and spent his years after high school wandering the late-night streets of Milwaukee with graffiti friends. Yearning for a big-city lifestyle, 1990s skaters, punks, graffiti-heads and the otherwise culturally estranged were drawn to one city. “Everyone said San Francisco was the place to be,” he said. 

In the fall of 1997, Roberts hitched a ride to Los Gatos, where he lived in a trailer park with four friends. After a month, the harsh reality that Los Gatos was not San Francisco dawned, and he “freaked the fuck out.” 

“I was like, ‘What the fuck did I do, dude?’” he says.

At his mother’s encouragement, Roberts applied to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was accepted with a scholarship from the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. But he felt out of touch with his classmates’ obscure artistic references and preferred to spend his time skating with friends in the Mission. When his dad had a stroke in the fall of his first year, Roberts dropped out and worked full time at Amoeba Music on Haight Street, packing CDs into theft-proof cases.

“Haight Street sucked, dude,” he said. “I remember working there and being like, ‘I hope someone’s pit bull doesn’t eat me right now.’”

Still, Roberts, called the seven years he worked at Amoeba a school unto itself, where he homed in on his place in San Francisco’s underground art and skate scenes. He skated with local Thrasher prodigies, played in hardcore and noise bands with coworkers, and regularly took acid and smoked DMT before drawing for hours.

“Joe once told me, ‘The thing I’m serious about is DMT. I’m not serious about art. I’m serious about these experiences,’” said art historian Ted Barrow. “A lot of professional artists that are on Joe’s level are strategic and tactical and insincere about their work, and Joe is just Joe. He’s not doing it because he thinks it’ll sell. He gives away his work. There’s no disconnect between his personality and his view of the world and the radiant thing he ends up making.” 

Roberts moved from the Mission to an Outer Sunset apartment with his girlfriend and son this year after a drive-by left an errant bullet lodged in their wall. He’s not as concerned for himself, he said, but had to look out for the safety of Ocean. 

His basement garage is a markedly different studio than his upstairs room in the Mission, which had white walls and natural light. Ocean’s tyke-size easel stands next to his father’s grownup one. A mini-skateboard sits next to a big skateboard. Father and son share paintbrushes, colors, and a playful spirit that fills the dank basement with an energy that no Mission sunlight or gallery-white walls could ever bring.

“My job is stupid. So why can’t he do it too?” Roberts said of sharing his space with Ocean. “I’m like, ‘Come hang out. Let’s fucking draw and shit and not eat paint. That’s what we do. I miss him right now. It’s weird to have to drop him off at preschool.”

His studio is strewn with paintings of a serene camping trip and landscapes of soul-crushing drug trips; dioramas of hand-made action figures and abandoned homes; and cluttered stacks of drawings that act as notes from his hallucinations. Roberts’ art imbues a deep sense of San Francisco, paying homage to specific skate landmarks and hills. 

“His work really celebrates what is unique to this part of the world in the same way that Wayne Thiebaud’s work does,” said Barrow. “It’s not just about the topography; it’s about the light, atmosphere, and colors.”

Roberts is not represented by a gallery. He doesn’t even have a website. “I don’t date,” he says, referring to the elbow-rubbing and self-promoting that come with being a career artist. 

His most overt form of promotion comes from his cryptic Instagram page, where he posts no photos of himself, filling it with drawings, mantras, and arcane shots of the streets of San Francisco that make viewers feel like they’re missing out on a secret reference.

“I’m just trying to brainwash everybody,” he said. “It’s like my own TV channel.”

Most of Roberts’ experiences showing his work in galleries came via Cox and Leo Fitzpatrick, whom Roberts met while skating in the late ’90s. This year, Roberts’ work was featured in a secret show in Manhattan that The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith dubbed “a mini-Whitney Biennial” because of the diversity of artists and styles and inclusion of emerging and established talents. 

“That was another time in New York City when people lost their minds when they saw his work,” said Cox, who sold Roberts’ work to graffiti-head-turned-art-mogul KAWS. “A lot of big artists, gallerists, and curators were like, ‘Who made this painting?’”

The answer is an artist whose work has never stayed static, even as his life becomes more settled. Roberts has dispensed with the regular drug trips and late-night larks and live music. Instead, he is focusing on fatherhood. Asked what his graffiti tag was during his days in Milwaukee, Roberts grinned. 

“Ocean,” he said.