Michael Ross grew up in Norway and Finland, moved to Maryland as an adolescent, and graduated with a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Maryland in 2000. Before moving to Athens, Georgia, where he finished his MFA in painting at the University of Georgia in 2016, Ross attended artist residencies in Norway, Iceland, and West Africa, and lived for several years in San Francisco. He has shown his work in galleries around the country, and is featured in the permanent collections of the University of Georgia, the Washington, DC Department of Transportation, and in numerous private collections in the United States and in Europe. In his work, Ross explores the interplay of the human, natural, and mythical worlds in a manner that emphasizes emotional and sensory experience. Ross continues to work out of his studios in Athens, Georgia, and Bethesda, Maryland.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION AT CURRENT MIDTOWN OPENING JULY 11, 2024
LMG: So Michael, do you want to start by talking about your background as an artist, and perhaps that extends beyond just your experience as an artist?
M. R. Yes, it's so hard to draw the distinction about where you start a story but my development as an artist started flourishing in high school. I had a tremendous art teacher who was a passionate landscape painter, Walter Barkman. He is still around. We also had an outstanding crew of colleague high school artists. When I needed refuge from my other classes and stresses, I just spent a lot of time in the art room and painted up a storm there, but I think if you look at influences, they would even go further back. I grew up in a household where art was common. It was a given. I also have creative parents. I remember visiting my grandmother's house in Norway very often as a kid, and there were lovely, luscious paintings in a style that I still emulate on the walls. They were probably painted in the early 1900s Norway, Norwegian landscapes. I remember especially this sweeping vista of some Birch trees or a river with wetlands in the foreground, all in tones of cool grays and cool greens, and this the sky where you could feel yourself in the landscape. I think when we're talking about landscape painting, which is an essential aspect of my work, you feel yourself in that landscape. You see these qualities sometimes in some of the French realists' works of the 1850s and 1860s.. I can go back to a trip I might've taken to France when I was 25 years old and feel what it felt like just by looking there. So this idea of a landscape as a portal and you bringing your personal history comes to mind. I can talk a little bit about my personal history. Still, ultimately as a viewer, you're going to connect your personal history to the image that the artist has made.
Fisher King 2019,44x48”, oil on canvas
LMG: So do you draw from your memories, and if so, where are some of those more important places that those memories were made from early childhood, coming up into more recent times? You can also use this as an opportunity to tell us a little bit about your personal life history.
M. R. Perfect, yes, my work is tied to memory and specific places. I was born in Norway, my father is from Norway and we moved to Finland because my dad had a job there when I was five or six years old. We lived in Helsinki, Finland, until I was 11. My mother is from New Jersey. We ultimately moved back to the United States and I spent middle school and high school in the Washington DC area. I've moved around quite a bit since, but we went back to Norway every summer and still go back pretty often. A lot of my, a lot of my creative journey, a lot of my memory of landscape comes from childhood from the summer islands, the southern islands of Norway where people live in the most beautiful old fishing villages where you can walk barefoot on rocks covered with lichen and with a million colors and wildflowers and jump into the sea, which is punishingly cold but not so cold and that refreshing and livening feeling of just being outdoors and being connected with your feet to the earth, to the water.
Three of my current paintings at Linda Matney Gallery I painted in Norway over the last several years. One of them, Blue Archipelago I started on-site, we'd rented a cabin, my family, during summer of 2013. I started painting.
We were on an island; there was a little shoal that's in the painting, maybe 30 yards long, and we'd swim out to it and scamper up the rocks, my brother and I.
I remember that painting came out of our jumping off that rock and swimming around there, but also a boat ride we took the night before. The twilights in the summer linger almost till midnight or even past midnight. We were on a motorboat way out in the archipelago, and there was a storm coming in. You saw this enormous sky with the twilight still lingering, lingering late, but half the sky was dark and cloudy, and the other half was light. Almost directly above us, you could see the split of the storm and a clear sky.
We were still 20 minutes by motorboat away from home, and we were kind of trying to outrace the storm, worrying that we'd get thunder and lightning bearing down upon us. But also there is this sense of beauty and the spirit of excitement. The painting has some of that in the sky and some of that feeling. Although it's just one figure, there's still a sense of solitude and communion with nature but with that feeling of the sublime in the landscape, and a lot of my landscapes tie into that dramatic feeling. I'm impressed with the dramatic painters of the past, the realists and the romantics and this idea of nature as a place for personal transcendence as a place that's on the border of danger and safety and the edge of human culture and the beginning of the natural or even the supernatural.
Red -tailed Hawk, 18x16 in Oil on canvas
A. W. You just started to talk a little bit about your studio practice and starting a painting in the field. Can you talk a little bit more about how you work out painting plain air and then bring it into the studio?
M. R. Yes. So, I'm a hybrid painter. I feel like both are very necessary. There are so many impractical elements when painting outside. You're dealing with mosquitoes,changing light, rain, et cetera, et cetera. But if you only paint the landscape from inside, from photos, you lose the feeling of the landscape because nature is infinitely more creative than we will ever be. So to try to recreate a natural space indoors from a photograph that you may or may not have even taken yourself is, is too limiting. So almost all of my landscapes relate to places that I've been, most of them I've started outside, and then I finish them in the studio. So I have that experience, that firsth and experience of being in the place and then I'll finish them from a combination of photos or from sticks and moss that I've brought into the studio from there to get some botanical detail. Occasionally I'll paint just from photographs, but it's never from one photograph. It's from a collection to create a more three-dimensional experience on their canvas.
Elecampane, 2016, 46x60”, oil on canvas
We can also talk about a lot of my figure paintings. In the figure paintings, it's often when the human figure dominates, and especially in some of the war paintings from my grad school thesis show, the landscape is more inventive because the figure dominates and the landscape takes a secondary presence.
LMG: You've talked already a lot about some of the themes in your work and what you're exploring in terms of the relationship with nature and how you experienced that and then depict that but are there other aspects of your work that the collectors and audience of the gallery might want to know?
Traveling Egret, 2009, 12x16”, oil on panel
M.R. Yes, there's a part of me that has a soft spot for things that are just luscious and lovely and delicate. I have a whole series of still life paintings that relate to that. Paintings of my toy soldiers from when I was a kid and desserts. The colorful, creamy, shiny swirling forms you might find on the top of the cupcake, that type of thing. I even find that in paintings of birds, portraits of birds, especially when you get a little closer up. There's a whole set of symbolism in birds and, but in terms of just the purely visual, they're a visual feast of pattern, of color, of texture. Especially in my smaller paintings, I try to convey thaton top of the image in addition to the image.
LMG: Comment further on the other works in the exhibit
M. R. There are three other paintings in the show, two that were from Norway and one is from here in Athens is called Two Towhees, and I have three drawings as well.
One of the landscapes is from the Southern coast painted just of those rocks I was talking about, but on a sunnier day a couple of years later. The other one is from a trip I took in the mountains with my brother through this gorgeous mountain pass after a storm with snow on either side and water trickling down every crevice in the rocks where we're following the footpaths of this herd of moose or reindeer, two or three animals. It's just the most remote wild country I've ever visited.
LMG: So you speak vividly of those experiences, but how do you relate to the soldier paintings?
M. R. The soldier paintings were an experiment. I've talked about my influences in terms of the landscape painters and the realists. These have included a lot of Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish realists. Still, I am also drawn to the dramatic figure painters, the narrative painters, what they called the history painters from the Baroque era like Peter Paul Rubens up to a Delacroix who is perhaps the most quintessential romantic painter a hundred or so years later. These grand colorists, these grand storytellers, intrigued me. The soldier paintings that I made during grad school relate to that tradition of what they at that time called history meaning. They're not just telling a story, but they're revealing an allegorical story. In the case of the war paintings, they were looking at an allegory of war and peace.
Almost like the split sky in the painting, I talked about earlier, where you have the dark sky and the light sky along with my affinity for the more joyful, decorative, and ebullient images of birds and cupcakes there is this beautiful, luxurious and opulent part of the life. Then there's this harder and darker and more difficult time that everybody has to deal with at some point in their life where war is perhaps the most extreme metaphor. So these paintings are metaphors or allegories of war and peace. I use the subject of war to discuss a sort of mandala, both sides, both the positive and negative, the two sides of coins of life. I used them in the context of trying to recreate history painting in the footsteps of Rubens or Delacroix, finding a subject that interested me strongly. I researched the eastern front of world war II. I mentioned I spent six years as a child in Finland, so my earliest visual memories are formed there. Even though I'm not a Finnish citizen, I speak Swedish, which is a second language in Finland. I don't speak Finnish, but I had such a strong heart connection to that country as a child and having to leave there as an 11-year-old has been probably one of the hardest things I did in my life,
, feeling uprooted from a country that was not yours. So the paintings are taken in part from historical research of that time period and in part from my visual memories of the landscape and in part from a book called the Uknown Soldier by Vino Lena. He was a Finnish author who created a national canonical work in Finnish literature. So some of the paintings are direct quotations from that book and allegories of war in peace, but they're also paintings about the connection and brotherhood for each other. You can see the care between one of the soldiers and the other. There are no combat scenes. It's all sort of these psychological portraits of the soldiers, their relationships to each other. And, most importantly, the connection to the land itself.
It feels like they're on the borderland here with the Soviet Union. The soldiers defending their land but in the sense of land is also protecting them. They are one with the forest envelops them. Their forest is their refuge, and they're protecting their refuge. And I would also like to say they're not political statements. I recognize that people are suffering on all sides of that conflict. And all of these young men who are in there, most of them in their early twenties had no agency. They were just sent there by the forces of the world and their superiors.
