John Virtue

John Virtue is a landscape artist who usually works in monochrome. He likes working with Black ink straight onto blank canvases as he likes the bold black marks it creates. His subject matter is usually the landscape of where ever he is living and after living in rural devon creating abstract paintings he was then approached by the national gallery in london where he took up a new expressive but not abstract way of working. I like the way John starts by looking at the landscape of the city and in his sketch book just marking the shapes and lines he can see showing the background as well as the foreground. He then takes these sketches back to his workshop where he works from these to create large scale, at first just silhouettes of london. I like how he goes straight in with the ink and if he makes a mistake he just works over the top. He builds his paintings up in layers starting with just loosely painting the main shapes of the city using ink. In his documentary he says that at this point it all looks wrong, so he works into the background using white acrylic. He likes using Jade cloths or his hands to paint with to mould it into the canvas. This allows him to model the forms he first created with ink. I love the contrast between the white acrylic and the black ink and how the acrylic softens the black lines. He then creates different textures using sprays and buckets of ink to create the gloom above london which John says represents all the carbon monoxide and pollution in the air.  I like how he creates an atmosphere in his paintings by using different techniques of spreading the ink across his canvas. But his main concern is the position and composition of his work.

John Virtues sketch book- creating basic lines and shapes to work from.

 John Virtues Black ink and white acrylic on canvas.

Link to documentary - here