Ross Brown

My work investigates the fragments of Modernity that remain within our present day built landscape through a parallel examination into the medium of painting itself. Subject matter is found within ambiguous spaces on the periphery of the built environment, where boundaries between civilization and nature, order and disorder, past and present have become blurred and indistinct. Similarly, disparate processes from the history of painting are appropriated and juxtaposed causing collisions of representation and abstraction within each composition.

My recent work has focused upon the phenomena of the Modern ruin, taking particular interest in architecture whose meaning has undergone a form of transformation over the passage of time. Drawing influence from the entropic psychological landscapes portrayed within the novels of JG Ballard and Andrei Tarkovsky's film “Stalker”, sites such as the once iconic St Peter's Seminary building near Glasgow are depicted within large scale works that place particular emphasis upon the technicalities of pictorial construction. Alternating chance-based processes (such as pouring, smearing and dripping) with more precisely constructed passages of painting, I intend to reflect processes of decay at work within architecture that once embodied a past generation's dream of a better future.

Channelling notions of appropriation and misuse that have occurred within these spaces following abandonment, disparate processes from the history of painting are sampled and layered challenging the illusionistic nature of the painted surface. Within certain works, Renaissance perspective and it's associated notions of a scientifically accurate means of pictorial illusion is interrupted by the materiality of Gerhard Richter's squeegee smear, or the amorphous blotting of Morris Louis' pouring process. Recent compositions also incorporate frameworks and grids reminiscent of the pictorial language of geometric abstraction. Through the interplay of opposing pictorial devices I hope to encompass the meeting of chaotic and orderly forces within these forgotten environments.