John Ross’s landscape paintings from the last decade explore the rugged beauty and shifting moods of Mother Earth. From the fiery, intense hues of Southern Spain to the cold, ethereal light of Scotland’s lochside, experience a visceral journey through place and history. Join Ross as he takes his paintbrush for a hike.
Opening Event: Saturday 29th March, 1-4pm. All welcome!
About the Exhibition
The exhibition Grim Up North? comprises the landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes and atmos-scapes that John Ross has painted over the last decade or so: “landscape with teeth”, as he describes it. John’s paintings let you see and feel the black heat and dangerous orange of Southern Spain, banging up against the will ’o’ the wisp change of the cold lochside light of North Scotland.
A key element of the exhibition is the celebration of the mighty Yorkshire-scape in all her forms and seasons; this webbed in with the long tough history of this great county. Using his paint brush as a walking stick, John explores a painted history where the hills, moors, becks and stones hold ancient secrets of things past, sometimes human, often dark, but always gripping.
John describes his relationship with his canvas as capricious. He will set out with the intention to render a bright summer’s afternoon, but the painting might prefer the last snows of winter as a subject. Glowering skies light up without being asked. The paintings dig their heels into the impasto mud and, like an octopus, simply change colour; leaving the artist no alternative but to don his swimming apron and jump into the dark, oily waters. As John remarks, “If I drown, it will be my own fault for giving into my own work. And that’s good enough for me.”
About the Artist
John Ross made a reputation for himself in the early part of his career with a bitterly comic pen and ink style seen in a range of solo exhibitions in Britain, Europe and the United States. His commissioned works were published widely across British and European broadsheet newspapers throughout the last decades of the 20th century. When asked how he arrived at the acid style of his work he answered grimly, “I learned in the Great Northern Beer Kitchen where I perfected the taste of ink and bile.”
Over nine years, John was a visiting artist at Andrew Carnegie’s Skibo Castle, working with forever changing and shifting lights of Northern Scotland’s seasons. John’s artistic influences range across the powerful atomos-scapes of J.M.W. Turner; the frozen comedy of Pieter Brueghel; the quiet understanding of Camille Corot; the mud, blood and howling stupidity of the No Man’s Land-scapes cartooned by Bruce Bairnsfather; through to the Great War sculptures of Charles Sargeant Jagger, his favourite sculptor.
Just as influential have been characters from his own childhood landscapes: of the Leicestershire of Jack the Ratcatcher, or Fred Green, the potato merchant who showed him the eel-filled glories of the Lincolnshire Fens. These figures, and his local landscape, have had a key impact on John; particularly the lasting impression of the great beauty of his local brick pit. A brick red clay which at the day's end he and his chums wore more as clothing on the trudge home, assorted ammonites ageing away in deep pockets. In his troubled dreams, the red tints of the brick pit ghost steal into his nightly canvas apparitions.
John’s works are memory-scapes of the places and characters of his own childhood landscapes. When asked, he laughs out as he remembers the old Leicestershire of Jack the Ratcatcher, or Fred Green, the potato merchant who introduced him to the eel-filled glories of the Lincolnshire Fens. Walking with such figures, in those long ago landscapes, remains a powerful poetry still quietly evident in John’s painting style.
Coming Home
The Everybody Gallery is delighted to welcome back John Ross, an important figure in our organisation's history. Everybody Arts, formerly known as Artworks, was founded by John Ross and Peter Stanyer in 2008. Close friends and contemporaries from their Royal College of Art days in the 1970s, they came together to realise a shared vision of establishing an independent art school in Halifax. Having worked in formal and academic arts education for decades, John taught in, and led, the Department of Graphic Art and Design at Leeds Met (now Beckett). Stan specialised in introducing and establishing drawing based curriculums across institutions such as the City Lit and Chelsea School of Art. Both worked over a period of time where art schools were being subsumed into universities. They both held the strong belief that as a result of these changes, too many were being excluded from a quality arts education and the wider benefits creativity brings. They established ‘The Everybody School of Art’ with the firm belief that art is for everyone no matter what age, background or ability might be.
For more information about Everybody Arts, visit our About Us page.