john roos - philosophy

Roosart is grass roots art. It's a direct response to the people and landscape around us, art of the everyday, where painting represents an essential reality, and provides a form of visual communication. My paintings are illustrated phrases about the necessity of being present in life.

When I see a structure or landscape that is true to itself, larger than life or built with hands and skills long forgotten, I paint it. My work is immediate and reactionary, and I hope my paintings have an "alive" quality to them - I am present in my painting!

I hope to provide an honest perspective of the everyday elements I represent: the silent work of shadow on silos, the intense purity of white steeple against blue sky, the strength and ambition of a bridge and the abundance of old barns, even when they are falling down. It was at an artist's residency in Vermont that I realized the power that barns hold over us. In the American mind, barns are both essential and distant things. These icons hold our past, innocence and hard work.

We see them as a whole.

I've discovered we rarely think about the parts - the wood, the dirt. Who looks at the Statue of Liberty and wonders where the bathroom is? We sense our history there, that is enough.

The materials for my frames, down to the nails and dirt, is old barn salvage. The wood from an old barn was often cut from trees whose width is no longer seen in this world, and put together by hands that knew things now forgotten. When you take a building apart the story comes out. My frames allow people to sense what a barn is up close (yes, please, sniff my frames). The bracing ideal of something inside the beauty of its true self.

It was, what it was, what it was. What it is.

And in closing: I am a correspondent. A writer of letters. A liver of life! Documentation gives me traction in this fragmented world of impersonal isolation. I approach life as an interested observer, and am a major part of my own audience. I’m like every other artist out there.

My message is:
Here I am. I exist. Do you exist too?