Ross Loveday | Journeys

Foreword

The journey from Eames Fine Art to Ross Loveday’s studio is not a long one but the shift in landscape is dramatic. It begins by crawling out from under the shadow of the Shard and ends in a converted cider press in leafy Bury-St-Edmunds. It is in this seemingly genteel destination that Ross Loveday begins each day with a riot.

Getting up early, armed with a cup of tea, this retired optician clears his mind of extraneous thoughts before channelling an intense emotional outpouring into the hundreds of canvases that flank his studio. The results are manifold, utilising a vast abstract vocabulary, honed over decades of artistic practice.

Taking the notion of ‘journeys’ as a starting point, this ambitious new body of work invites us to traverse painterly landscapes that are recalled from memory and highly charged with emotion. Through a dazzling array of gestures, colours and deeply excavated layers- Ross’s latest paintings blow open the possibilities of what a landscape can be.

Encompassing such diverse recollections as his upbringing in industrial South Wales, through to the wide planes of Suffolk countryside that surround his home, the images that emerge are bold and energetic as though caught in perpetual motion. 

Breaking with convention, disobedient horizon lines wander into subterranean depths, scratched through thick layers of paint before leaping into flight. We may not be sure whether we’re looking above, below, within or without- but following the traces of the artist’s hand across these shifting terrains provides a roadmap to guide us back to reality- refreshed and rejuvenated.

Thomas Yeomans, April 2022