Pent-up Art
This is the second in a series of three interviews to be offered in a three-month period exploring the challenges of a trio of Cincinnati artists in various transitions in their careers.
All around his third floor studio in the Pendleton Art Center, Over-the-Rhine, Charles Emery Ross's color-splashed abstract paintings and contemporary landscapes seem threatened to keep themselves off the walls.
The energy in these paintings should come as no surprise. Ross, with the exception of some dabbling here and there as a “ Sunday painter,” kept his easel waiting for 30 years.
Ross, 71, had two careers. A holder of a certificate from the old Central Academy of Commercial Art in Walnut Hills, he had a successful 20-year career in Cincinnati advertising in which he entered as a graphic designer.
After exiting the ad world, Ross spent ten more years in real estate where he renovated and flipped properties for considerable profit.
Money made and a family with three grown children reared, Ross took the opportunity about 12 to 14 years ago—he can't remember exactly—to dedicate himself to making fine art.
Ross calls his decision to become a painter “my third career.”
He said he ultimately found commercial art restrictive given that so much of it is made under the heavy thumbs of clients. Although initially an art director, his duties in advertising evolved into copy writing and administration.
This success (he describes as “chasing the money” ) kept moving him farther and farther away from his art board. Yet, Ross recalls he couldn't quite quash the urge to make art that latched onto him as early as kindergarten in Anderson Township.
“I would take toy pistols that I had and trace around them on what must have been manila folders,” Ross recalled. “ I'd cut them out and color them and give them to school mates.”
“All the time, my teacher was taking these cardboard things away from me because she said I shouldn't be playing with guns.”
Another teacher, when Ross was in the third or fourth grade, proved to be prescient about what was to be key to his art even now.
“I remember pretty distinctly I had a landscape,” Ross said. The lawn was green. The sky was blue and probably a yellow sun with the rays emitting.
He said his teacher was taking someone around the art class, looked down and commented, “Charles likes bright colors.”
And now over six decades later free of business distractions, Ross is unleashing his pent-up creativity. It is an explosion of color and energy.
Ross especially impresses with homages to 20th century art. The native Cincinnati artist speaks of “mentors” who have provided a foundation for his work but he names none.
Certainly, a major aspect of Ross's work reaches back beyond that yellow sun in the third grade to the intense colors of the Fauvists.
“I just wallow in the color,” Ross said barely containing an almost boyish exhilaration. “My work is primarily about color, it is fair to say.”
In addition, Ross's agitated brushing brings associations with Willem De Kooning and Karel Appel.
One Ross painting done in neutrals (he occasionally can fast from color) is a deep, reverent bow to the architectural forms found in the abstract expressionism of Franz Kline in the 1940s.
Orange Crush (2007) with its stunning collision of colors powerfully speaks to the colorist influences. The lower left quadrant of the canvas blooms in yellow, white and small intrusions of orange. In the upper right area of the picture, the oranges become dominant but they also are engulfed in smokey browns.
At the focal point, near the center of the painting, there is a gash made from layers of red and orange paint. The hot hues are interrupted with a dash of purple. It is almost a wound in the canvas
But what's this just to the right of gaping red?
Ross has taken a gamble. He introduces a silver metallic base paint—the kind you used to see on basement pipes. The silver paint is inserted amid the softer acrylic textures of the painting's general palette.
It's just a swipe of silver. One might worry that the brief smear of silver would steal focus from the near by reds. It doesn't.
The silver passage catches the light and bounces forward. That maneuver, in turn, causes the “red wound” to take on more depth pulling the viewer's eyes deeper into the mysterious crimson passage.
Ross is not finished. At far lower right near the bottom of Orange Crush three small blocks done in purples and blues with streaks of green are introduced. They look architectural-perhaps three morose apartment buildings in an urban housing project.
These highly defined squares would seem to be out of place. They aren't.
Despite his swashbuckling approach to the canvas, Ross is a constructionist. He has enough clarity about the geometric shapes to observe, “I'm part painter, part designer.”
For example, look closely at those three purple squares. They are complemented by two brief brush swipes of blue-plum color positioned in the upper third of the canvas. Their placement is such that they form a subtle triangularity with the trio of violet blocks below.
Ross excels in charged non-representational or what the abstract expressionists used to call 'action paintings.' Yet, in his landscapes this artist manages to incorporate the same forces of color and aggressive brushing that define his abstracts.
In his landscape, Almost Home (2009), there is a striking expanse of sky in turmoil. Cumulus clouds in dark grays, bruised blues, browns and ultimately black touched with a swath of wine challenge each other for dominance of this troubled expanse of skies.
The massive turbulence lies some where between the ferocity Turner captures in his nautical skies in The Slave Ship and those apocalyptic skies that served as fearsome battlefields for warring gods in the late Baroque period.
However, a brushing in of a swirling white cloud form intervenes amid all this meteorological strife. Yet, the piercing white comes without the melodramatic sun rays so favored in religious art.
Still, the break of white is emotional enough to suggest a spiritual presence or at the very least as a space of visual and emotional relief.
In Almost Home, the horizon line comes in quite low. A strip of structures of what is perhaps a rural Midwestern town runs across the canvas like a strip at about three quarters of the way down from this 48" x 48" painting. Ross's decision to give the town a diminutive presence only enhances the power of his sky.
The isolation of the town is further underscored by a larger band of barren brown-black earth that completes the bottom fourth of the painting.
Even though Ross, unfortunately, remains under-appreciated in the Cincinnati art market, he estimates he has sold upward of about 40 paintings last year.
He has shown in national galleries and until recently outdoor art shows. The Sheldon Fine Art Galleries with locations in Naples, FL, and Newport, RI, currently represent him.
Ross's price range, despite such excellence, remains reasonable— about $500 for small canvases to around $5000 for the larger abstracts and landscapes.
Early next year, Ross will expand his work space to the new Brazee Studios now under development in Oakley. It is also likely he will maintain a presence at Pendleton.
Ross wants to move his energetic brushes on to contemporary figurative work and still lifes.
Having come to this art world late in life, Ross reflects. “I feel like there is so much I need to explore and want to try because it's all play land for me.”
