The Cave. A River. An Island

Ross Andrews, Island Forest, 2024. Image courtesy of Fiona Little.

Ross Andrews

Gallery 3

Friday 9 August - Sunday 1 September 2024

Opening Thursday 8 August 2024, 6pm - 8pm

Ross Andrews’s brush channels energy from landscapes and their resilience. It’s a painter’s abstract antidote to counteract his distaste for too-frequent disturbance by the media disinformation that serves to destroy nations, lives and climate action.

Uncleared Australian landscapes have managed to survive, so far, despite snail’s pace climate action by governments immobilised by threats of culture and climate wars, waged by local media channels wholly-owned by overseas interests.

Their disinformation is an old toxin. In Plato’s Cave, written 2,400 years ago, false narratives were screened for imprisoned citizens by jailers who cast shadow-plays onto a cave wall.

All prisoners were forced to watch the lies of shadow-stories. That is, until one human escaped to stand shocked under the sun, galvanised by the truths of colour, and nature’s chaotic life.

In his mid-teens, Andrews escaped the ‘cave’ of an unsettled home life following the death of a friend. He took to the road, and happened to find Plato’s cave allegory in a book in a country town library.

Encouraged, the artist sought freedom and truths in national parks and landscapes.

Andrews devised the exhibition recently while painting on an island sanctuary that’s among the thousands of doomed seaplaces to be first to go under climate change.

Fellow visitors to this tiny coral cay included hundreds of thousands of fearless terns and other seabirds, and thousands of turtle hatchlings on frantic journeys from beach to sea.

While, back home, the media continues pushing comforting siren songs for vested interests: don’t worry, the climate’s still well; we must dig more coal and must sell more gas.

About the Artist

Ross Andrews is an expressive, contemporary landscape painter who works from Studio 7 at M16 Artspace in Canberra.

Many of his acrylic works on archival-quality aluminium panels are painted en plein air, or begin ‘out there’.

Each is a visual and emotional response to the environment.

He builds his paintings in vivid layers, capturing free and unexpected moments.

His subject matter is Australia-wide … national parks, natural places and townscapes.

As a painter he is a rapporteur on Australia’s environmental wellbeing, continuing a similar role that began in his first career in journalism.

He is a lifelong painter, drawer and sculptor, as the son of professional artists.

His art education included several years of night courses in drawing, painting and sculpture at the Canberra School of Art. It continues through courses with Australian and international contemporary artists.

Ross Andrews sketching with waterbrushes in Trephina Gorge, East MacDonnell Ranges, NT, July 2024