"Painting should always have some mystery about it."
Alexander Sharpe Ross
Alexander Sharpe Ross was a leading American illustrator in the 1940s and 50s, with his work on the covers of Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and Colliers. Along with a handful of key illustrators —Coby Whitmore, John Whitcomb, Al Parker, Norman Rockwell—Ross helped create an indelible image of Americans in the post WWII decades.
In the 1960s, Ross moved dramatically into the fine arts—painting abstracts, surrealists, portraits—always seeking new technique. “Inventive Realism” he called it when pressed for nomenclature, and explained, “My subjects are mainly flowers and dreamlike human figures. Flowers have beautiful shapes that lend themselves to abstraction, and I incorporate new dimensions in them, using the essence of ‘flower’ from memory to create a whole gamut of emotions.”
Ross was awarded an Honorary Degree of Master of Arts by Boston College in 1953. An assignment from the US Air Force took him to Alaska where he painted his impressions of one of American’s foremost frontiers. The award-winning works are now in the permanent collection of the Air Force. In 1969, Ross designed a postage stamp for professional baseball, celebrating the centennial of the Cincinnati Reds.
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, Ross came to Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, as a youth. He was largely self-taught, although he had one year of night school at Carnegie Tech. His first break occurred in 1941 when one of his illustrations was chosen from a roomful of contestants to be a Good Housekeeping cover. The editor, Herbert Mayes, commissioned 130 additional cover illustrations over the next dozen years at roughly $1000 apiece. The covers were of children, mostly Ross’s own who early on learned to model for him. After that, Ross became quite popular as a painter of “clinch” pictures—men and women in romantic postures. His clinches appeared in Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, and Colliers.
Ross worked in a large variety of media: oils, watercolors, serigraphs, collages, pastels, halftones, and acrylics on gesso. For a time, Ross preferred watercolor “…because of the spontaneous outburst factor. When one is feeling happy, he doesn’t put the feeling aside, but expresses it at once, at the full height of his feelings. That is the way with watercolor.” As one art critic summarized, “The overall impact of Alexander Ross’s painting is one of immense enjoyment of the spectacle of nature. His are assured and happy pictures.”
Ross was profoundly interested in religious art. “It’s one of the most fascinating fields of creation I can think of.” He has created paintings of biblical prophets for the Mormon Church, illustrated three religious books and designed stained glass windows for a Danbury, Connecticut, church. In a major show in the 57th Street gallery, Eric, in New York City, a critic wrote, “It has been said that Ross’s vision resembles that of Renoir and Marie Laurencin, as all three share a passion for nudes, flowers and children. However, this is where the resemblance ends, as Alexander Ross has brought to his compositions an entirely new and very personal interpretation, dynamic but also sensitive, where abstractions taken over from realism in a magic blend of forms and colors.”
Successful watercolorist Fred Whitaker gave a major, published speech in 1980 about Ross’s achievements as an illustrator, likening his work to such famous American illustrators as Remington, Homer and Hopper. “When the story of today’s art epoch is written, there may well be general agreement that the real art contribution of the mid-twentieth century was that of the illustrators and commercial artists. I know of no artist who experiments more than Ross in approach to the mode of presentation; in color, in the manner of ap***ing paint, in his brushing, in the use of new angles of compositional arrangement. His one great fear is that he may become static, even afraid of copying himself.”
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