Plenty of Time: Marc Ross at Work

Marc Ross, No Explanation Needed installed at Cultural Arts Center, August 2015

The Columbus Cultural Arts Center felt like the interior of a jewel box when I visited the show of Marc Ross's painting, which closed on the 29th of August. The space was perfect for the show of large-scale, luminous paintings dominated by single colors. Each had breathing room and glowing room, for Ross's painting so both, like living organisms.

What's the difference between a something alive and something that's not? That's a Sesame Street concept, isn't it, a fundamental distinction that we learn in our very early years? Paintings fall into the inanimate category, despite the metaphors any art writers or gallery-goers can fabricate. But Marc Ross's work does indeed invite a serious reconsideration of the space between animate and inanimate in art. 

Marc Ross, Memento #1, 62 x 84." Acrylic, pastel, colored pencil.

In the gallery talk that closed this show, No Explanation Needed, the artist confessed to me that he hates to give talks because he has so little to say. He was relieved of the necessity to hold forth by questions from his audience, which revealed a great deal. 

Marc Ross, Memento #1, Detail.

The most important thing Ross told us is that each of these works takes a very long time to complete, and that completion is marked simply and practically: It's done when he sees that he has nothing more to add. 

On our close inspection, it becomes clear how much he has accumulated to create deceptively simple works. In this detail of Memento #1, one sees the endless variety of vertical, superficial striations. We note that the line gouged across and into the painting reveals that the surface color sits atop a deep history—an archaeology—of decisions, of which we know only that Ross changed the colors many times. Only he knows what else has happened and what has been expunged on this surface over its long process of becoming what it is where he's decided it ends.

For Ross, the importance and the pleasure of painting are the process. He has a large studio in the home he shares with his wife. But even she is strictly banned when he is working, because his concentration is so intense. 

Marc Ross, Make Me That Happy, 68 x 60."

Yet when he tries to explain what he does in the studio, one would not be mistaken in describing the process as play. While his time is strictly guarded, he is not exactly focused—he doesn't know what will happen, and he has no strategy. The process is to see what can happen; to allow himself the time and the space and the mental blankness to be relaxed and receptive. 

Is this not the state of a child, who can make something out of nothing at any moment, generating great ideas as easily as a swallow flies, whose imagination is as vital an organ as his lungs? 

What this artist does is invisible to us because all those months he spends in the studio are in efforts that are painted over. His work is effaced constantly, and allowed to stand only once. If we consider the saw that our bodies continually replace themselves as cells die and slough away, Ross's paintings are self-renewing bodies, yet without any loss of material. They accrete their histories, growing heavier and thicker with each application of material. 

Marc Ross, Make Me That Happy, Detail
showing surface drawing

As we usually imagine artistic purpose, during his sequestration the artist will be concentrated on his subject or passion. This might be advancement of a dream, the resolution of a personal angst, or support for a social or political cause in the world. We are a little deflated to hear Ross tell us that he's not thinking about anything in particular while he works.

My point is that there is never any way to know what goes on in an artist's mind while s/he is working. "Big" thoughts or "ordinary" ones? Who is to judge? Ultimately, who cares? What Ross has put into these paintings that we can see and experience as viewers is time. 

Marc Ross is a contemplative artist, a type of artist for whom there cannot be enough respect. Knowing that we see only the final stages of a work made over months should slow our breathing and tell us to pause before any one of these works. A show like No Explanation Needed is in fact an embarrassment of riches—almost too much—for every painting calls to us, and every one should demand hours of contemplation.

The surfaces of these works are histories of what the artist has been experienced and buried; they are histories inscribed with organized—if unarticulated—conclusions based on experience. These outcomes, present on the surface, satisfy the artist who trusts that he needn't explain them or himself. We will take them up for what beauty, interest, silliness, or meaning we find or attribute when we explore them. The artist doesn't tell what's there; the artist doesn't tell us what he thought about: as Ross says, he may not even know. The important thing is that the lavish expenditure of time is inherent in the work, and it is now ours to contemplate.

Marc Ross, Epiphany, 72 x 41," acrylic, pastel, colored pencil.

These paintings are steeped in the hundreds of studio hours Ross spent looking at and interacting with these surfaces, making decisions both strategic and spontaneous about what he might do to them. Those decisions are eccentric as far as we know or care: whether he follows academic, industrial, or nursery school procedures doesn't matter to what we see except to the extent that he wishes to reveal them.

Ross's paintings document the value of time spent with oneself; of being free and choosing consciousness over obliviousness; of routine experimentation (with no promised outcomes) as sufficient for making private sense whether the cosmos provides it or not. They hint that beauty can arise—and glow—from months and months of uninspired, discretely accomplished efforts. We see how order and vision impose themselves quietly upon patient periods of testing and trial without capitalist ends. We consider that working for our own ends and understanding can create beauty and satisfaction.

The history of the artist's time, patience, and thoughts inscribed in this art work are presented very directly to us. If we will commit  to listening and looking, the communication is as immediate as conversation without the small talk—surprisingly familiar, and mentally and physically liberating. If we spend a little time, it will generate more for us. The time taken for observation creates in the observer much more than it takes, bringing us time and space and vistas forgotten, if not new.

Is artistic creativity always going to produce something novel, topical, or "meaningful?" Sometimes the artist gives us something as old as the earth and human nature, reminding us of our need for quiet, for fallow times, for large questions or contemplation of the inner landscape as opposed to the social one.

Ross paints in a questioning vein that stands out in a busy, egoistic world. His slow and quiet work is refreshingly full of deep life and conversation. Though No Explanation Needed is closed, look for more of Ross's work coming in the next few months at Ohio University's Chillicothe branch Bennett Hall Gallery (September through October); and in the Riffe Gallery's "Inaugural Juried Exhibition," November 2015 through January 10, 2016.

Marc Ross, No Explanation Needed installed at the Cultural Arts Center, summer 2015.

Photographs courtesy of Marc Ross

Why Ask Why? Waiting Patiently with Marc Ross

Marc Ross, FISCAL HEART, 55 x 53," acrylic on canvas. 2013.

 There it is, above, as big as I can present it: Marc Ross's Fiscal Heart, recently shown among a large body of his paintings and drawings at the Art Access Gallery in Bexley, Ohio.

To tell the truth, it's only the pressure of my admiration for Ross's works that forces me to break silence and find words for it. His art is so far beyond the verbal that it tests all the ways I know of communicating about it. This photograph seems simply silly to anyone who has looked into the depth, saturated ripeness, and calm discipline of this painting. 

Smack a snapshot of the night sky on your ceiling and say, "There's the firmament." It's rather the same thing as trying to represent these works. Your body responds dumbly: You wish to move forward and into the event, to merge, or to respond in kind. With Ross's work, you want somehow to make a statement of equal measure from whatever materials could compel your mind as profoundly as paint, pencil, and watercolor do his.

Marc Ross, detail, Fiscal Heart. 2013.

Ross's paintings stop me in my tracks for the reason that they exert equal impulses to come closer and to move farther away. Every angle is the right one to view these. Every spot reveals yet another aspect of their uncanny force.

Stand across the room and you'll see in all of them that the center is luminous in comparison to a denser, darker surround of color. But in none of Ross's works do the dark, framing edges guide the eye, as a simple drama, into the "heart" of the image.

In fact, from a distance, the relationship between lighter center and denser border pulses slowly in and out. The light sometimes seems to emerge, then the darkness appears  to close in. 

The view from very close range is similarly surprising.The countless layers of colors and transparent mediums laid down, sanded away, revised and removed again achieve the illusion of a profound depth that the viewer could swoon and fall into. Yet lying on top are well-defined  ribbed lines of color—like girders on a skyscraper construction, high above the abyss. These forms are material, palpable, and detailed. From these shapes—as from the central criss-crossing of lines, we know that there is purpose here—enough to give us the confidence to find or to make meaning.

Marc Ross, SENTIMENT, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48."

I briefly met Ross at the Art Access opening, and we did indeed speak of great painters whose work is similarly difficult to represent because of the depth of its layering (like his) the subtlety of mark (like his) and the enormity of time's defining presence that inheres in the physical work—but never in its reproduction. Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin.

Ross's work imitates none of theirs, though.

Marc Ross, TRAIN OF NO IMAGE, #5. 23 X 15,"
mixed media on paper, 2013.

Work like isn't possible unless it comes directly from an individual's own mind-body collaboration. Making work so deep and, contemplative, and large, is laborious. Covering the surface evenly time after time; once committed to an action, repeating it for hours across an enormous surface: these require steadiness few can muster. Reversing a decision can be the work of days—if one can find the courage to make such a decision. Such labor consumes whole (not fractional) months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of—call it what you will: commitment, trance, physical labor, dedicated idleness… to stay, continue, and to realize the impulse that creates the painting and must run its course. 

The metaphor of child labor is nearly always a good one for art-making. In Ross's case, it is exceptionally apt because it highlights the aspect so many women know of having to wait, struggle, and bear the tension simultaneously with a process that will not be rushed, explained, or ever rationally understood. When it's over, there's a phenomenal, forever mysterious outcome. 

The kind of creativity that produces work like Ross's may remind us of others who have worked in such a vein, the Rothko's and Martin's. But, as anyone who has labored will agree, a long process requiring so much work and trust is by definition always  unique. Viewers who spend more than glancing time with the art instantly perceive the pure DNA.

Marc Ross, detail, drawing, TRAIN OF
NO IMAGE #7, 2014

As in the drawing, left, "Train of No Image #5," Ross's works have histories of discipline that are both on the surface and far below it. Grids with lines of varying densities, colors, and patterns occupy the centers of the paintings, and cover the entire surfaces of his print-like drawings. Using watercolors in several forms, colored pencils, graphite, the occasional paste, and various means of subtraction, he produces these mesmerizing images which, like the paintings, cycle through relationships of space, color, light and dark, presence and absence. Even one's perception of the materials used, however searchingly one observes, never settle on what only the artist can confirm.

I could write for pages and still feel that I've said nothing of any real significance about this artist and his work. Ultimately, Ross's work has to do with trust and patience; with reliance on the positive core of indecision and the way it makes you refuse haste. The more time you spend with any of this work, the more time you want with it. It gently pulls you into a place of contemplation or imagination. I find myself going back and being where I am, making up my lovely, saturated present from my buried and boxed past.

You have to see it to believe it.