The current body of work titled “Living in a Science Fictional World” was begun during the Covid lockdown when I came to the conclusion that I no longer wanted to work in large scale oil painting. I shifted to water-based mediums and I began working on a smaller scale. The work did begin as cityscapes but painted in a much more classical manner. Though within a year it evolved into landscape with some urban remnants. Unfortunately, the majority of these earlier cityscape paintings were lost in the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California in early 2025.

 

The work in this exhibition at Alto Beta, “Living in a Science Fictional World” comes from multiple sources and ideas. A conversation with the past is definitely present. There is also definitely a conversation with the future in that once again the presence of humans may or may not be within the world of these paintings.  Ultimately, the dichotomy mentioned in previous paragraph is still present. Most likely, it will persist to the end, if I had to hazard a guess.

 

The system set up was derived from an extensive studying of three historic landscape painters: Jacob van Ruisdael, Caspar Daivd Friedrich and John Constable. Constable is particularly important due to the fact that he painted at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which began in his country of origin, England. It is well documented that he was deeply dismayed with the coal fired pollution of Victorian London and the ill effect that it had on the health of his wife who died young from what was most likely tuberculosis. He moved her multiple times to escape the bad air but to no avail. His insistence, to his own financial detriment, to paint the past as he found it in rural Suffolk, his home county, is quite obvious. He was profoundly saddened by what was being lost.

 

I would posit that my current work may exist somewhere at the end of this process that was begun in the early nineteenth century. I’m still trying to sort it out.

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Adam Ross