"Whimsical" is the adjective most often used to describe painter Edie Roberson's work.

It's apt description. Roberson painted Mickey Mouse onto one of her bathroom tiles, visible when you open the mirrored medicine cabinet. She couldn't resist applying a trompe l'oeil illusion to the top curve of a window in her study.

And what else can you say about a work such as "A Mole Plays Liszt"? Mounted in a fur-adorned frame for her exhibit at the Salt Lake Main Library, it's one of many works encompassing her output in "Eclectic Paintings and Automata." The exhibit, which includes works she has created since 1966, is also an anchor of sorts for this year's Utah Arts Festival, June 24-27 at Library Square.

Still, questions about why her latest work is rife with anthropomorphized animals bore her. "Why not?" she responded during an interview in her Avenues home studio. "I don't believe there are any rules."

Problem is, the capricious themes evident in so much of her acrylic painting belie the painstaking precision of her methods. Acrylic isn't oil paint, she might remind you. It dries faster than oil, leaving little room for error and even less time for the "whimsy" of experimentation her many local fans adore.

The demands of her painting are so great, in fact, she long ago abandoned the idea of playing classical music while she works. "I wouldn't even hear it," she said. "I do [paintings] for fun, but they take forever."

Meanwhile, her studio gathers stray objects and curios at the expense of continual focus on the easel. A miniature plastic elk brays atop a mounted advertisement for Olympia brand beer. An electric bread maker rests on a nearby work table, and a frame cutter sits on the floor.

"Watch out! That's a guillotine," Roberson said.

The 81-year-old artist grew up within miles of famed painter N.C. Wyeth's studio in Wilmington, Del., and later trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Roberson has been one of Utah's most-watched, most-beloved artists ever since her move to Salt Lake City in the mid-1960s, teaching for a while at the University of Utah.

When she's not fly-fishing with her boyfriend, her home studio is -- the repetition is unavoidable -- home. "I've been painting 'solid' for seven months now," she said.

One of Roberson's latest works was completed for the Salt Lake Art Center's "Contemporary Masters" exhibition of art works doubling as 18 playable holes of miniature golf. It puts Michelangelo's "David" in a green golf jacket -- a flap of which conveniently covers the groin area, thanks to a gust of wind -- while a rabbit with the face of Rembrandt stands ready as a caddy.

It's all of a piece with many of Roberson's other works. Even when confronted with the grandeur of southern Utah's redrock country, she can't resist a fanciful touch. For her 2005 painting "Annie's Trip to Southern Utah," anthologized in the recent book Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts , she places Little Orphan Annie atop a toy motorbike, racing down a highway laced with redrock scenery.

Fantastical images unleash the fanciful in those who see them, rather than dictating the terms of the piece, Roberson said.

Donna Poulton, curator of Western art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, agrees. An inherent sense of visual drama, as Poulton points out in a passage from Roberson's profile in Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts, is necessary for flights of artistic fantasy: "Although Roberson creates a sense of premeditation and tension that she refuses to address or resolve, the overall effect is playful and even liberating for the viewer."

One viewer, in a book of visitors' remarks for Roberson's exhibition at the Salt Lake Main Library, took a similar tack: "I experienced both refreshment and challenge. How could that be?"

The trick to channeling whimsy, Roberson said, is not to channel it at all. "It may get crazier," she said. "I don't know where it's going to go. I just go with it."