Ross Loveday | Glimpse | 21 October - 21 November 2021

When confronted by a Ross Loveday print, it is our sensing, feeling intuition, rather than our rational, thinking mind, that tells us we are looking at a landscape. There are the colours, the earthy tones of ochre and green and the texture; the depth and physicality of the marks. Perhaps most importantly, though, there is an expansiveness, a sense that we are standing before something as it opens before us.

Ross is not concerned with, as he puts it, pretty pictures; his relationship with landscape runs deeper than the superficial, is not limited to a single moment. When talking about his use of green in these works, he speaks of a car journey, undertaken countless times, from his home in Bury St. Edmunds to the Suffolk Coast, and of the fields that he passes on the way. Looking out of the window, he sees, sometimes, the verdant green of grasses and young crops. At other times ferns dominate, autumnal oranges and browns. In winter, colour gives way to a starker view, one of naked structure, demarcations. This is how Ross experiences landscape; not as sumptuous vistas at which we have been directed to look by a guidebook, but as something we live in, travel through, that impresses itself upon us, again and again, settles into our subconscious, to later rise within us, charged with emotions it is not always easy to name. It is from such glimpses that this body of work has sprung forth.

It can be easy to forget how physical the work of printmaking is. In Ross’s case, however, we are instantly struck by its kinetic nature. Using the full width or the edge of a decorator’s brush, Ross applies the adhesive for the carborundum powder with broad, raw, vigorous marks or sometimes just a spontaneous flick. His experience with this medium, which results in both the vibrancy of his colours and the painterly quality of these prints, is what allows him to work in the moment, forgoing calculation. It is for this reason that we might consider these pieces less abstracted landscapes in any kind of cerebral sense, and more emotional responses to landscape, to which we in turn respond with our own individual, personal emotions.

Having worked in this way for years, the method is as deeply imprinted in Ross’s process as the carborundum which embosses the paper of his prints and yet, he is always finding new avenues to explore. Nothing demonstrates this as immediately as the collage pieces featured in this exhibition. Their sharper geometries allude to a new direction in Ross’s work that is picked up in the paintings included in this exhibition - a foretaste of next year’s Gallery show.

The landscapes that have occupied Ross’s mind as he has been painting this new series are those of his childhood: the mining villages of South Wales. Again, these are no mere representations - he has recalled them, in much the same way as with the aforementioned fields; in snatches and glimpses. In his blues and blacks and use of Payne’s grey there is the trace of coal, and huge slag heaps. Scratched-in motifs speak subtly of the railway lines that connected such villages to the coast, of ladders that descend into the darkness. There is no shallow nostalgia present for this industrial world now mostly planted over with forests, though there is an act of remembrance, a transmutation of these solid places into immersive paintings. In all cases, it is not a romanticised landscape that Ross presents to us, but something real, someting which we might not look at twice, and yet, if we could see it with his eyes, as this show allows us to, a landscape in which we can recognize the sublime.

- Luke Wallis