Grim Up North?

• Saturday 29 March 2025 13:00
  Saturday 31 May 2025 16:00

• The Everybody Gallery Shaw Lane Halifax, England, HX3 9ET United Kingdom (map)

John Ross’s landscape paintings from the last decade explore the rugged beauty and shifting moods of Mother Earth. From the fiery, intense hues of Southern Spain to the cold, ethereal light of Scotland’s lochside, experience a visceral journey through place and history. Join Ross as he takes his paintbrush for a hike.

About the Exhibition

The exhibition Grim Up North? comprises the landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes and atmos-scapes that John Ross has painted over the last decade or so: “landscape with teeth”, as he describes it. John’s paintings let you see and feel the black heat and dangerous orange of Southern Spain, banging up against the will ’o’ the wisp change of the cold lochside light of North Scotland.

A key element of the exhibition is the celebration of the mighty Yorkshire-scape in all her forms and  seasons; this webbed in with the long tough history of this great county. Using his paint brush as a walking stick, John explores a painted history where the hills, moors, becks and stones hold ancient secrets of things past, sometimes human, often dark, but always gripping.

John describes his relationship with his canvas as capricious. He will set out with the intention to render a bright summer’s afternoon, but the painting might prefer the last snows of winter as a subject. Glowering skies light up without being asked. The paintings dig their heels into the impasto mud and, like an octopus, simply change colour; leaving the artist no alternative but to don his swimming apron and jump into the dark, oily waters. As John remarks, “If I drown, it will be my own fault for giving into my own work. And that’s good enough for me.”