BUILD UP (3)

Robert Ross is an award-winning painter based in Winter Park, Florida. He studied art as an undergraduate at Oakland University, then later at Crealde School of Art with Rima Jabbur and in workshops with Stuart Shils and Zoey Frank.  He began painting landscapes from observation and then moved indoors to paint from photos, drawings, memory and imagination.  Ross is inspired by the urban environment that surrounds him and how it is changed by humans as regularly as a rural landscape is affected by the four seasons. His paintings are known for slightly off-center perspectives, strong composition and shapes, and a focus on light and color harmonies. Ross has had two museum exhibitions, a solo show at the Daytona Beach Museum of Art and Science (“Unique Perspectives: Paintings by Robert Ross”) and a group show at the Polk Museum of Art (“Hindsight 2020: Art of this Moment”), both in 2020. His paintings also have been exhibited in many other venues in Central Florida in the past 12 years. The three paintings by Robert Ross in the OFA’s 2022 Art Show make up a series titled “Build Up,” based on the construction process for the new headquarters of the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation in Winter Park.  Ross was inspired to paint the series over a period of several months as he viewed the structure’s daily mutations in the morning sunlight. The beams and girders and their moving shadows created an abstract daily rehearsal, a “build up” for the completed work.