Rural Landscapes and Architecture: Painting by Carol Ross
Internet Connections, acrylic on board
Carol Ross is a Washington-based painter who works primarily in acrylic, creating stylized, neutral-hued paintings of rural landscapes and architecture. The artist’s style sees large objects like hills, trees, and houses reduced to rounded shapes and planes of rich colour, abstracted yet comfortably familiar.
Rainbow Pipeline, acrylic on canvas
I’m really enjoying Carol’s recent Social Isolation Series -- in these works the artist paints a recurring grey landscape dotted with houses, or criss-crossing laundry lines hung with earth-toned garments. The focus of these works is less detail and more building an overarching mood and atmosphere -- snowy, cold landscapes with no visible human or animal figures evoke a sense of solitude, even with multiple dwellings and evidence of life. These paintings are indeed very apt for 2020, even in summer.
I also love Carol’s Landscapes -- the style employed in these works ranges from bright and slightly simplified with flattened planes of colour, to the kind of gestural realism that one might expect from paintings en plein air. Orange and yellow-hued rolling hills give the viewer the impression of a warm, autumnal landscape.
