Ross Chisholm

Ross Chisholm deconstructs notions of traditional portraiture by skillfully painting figures from found photographs and reproductions, and then interrupting them with visual breaks in the form of geometric abstractions, loose brushwork, and thick dabs of paint. His subjects are borrowed, singly or in combinations, from several distinct art historical and vernacular styles, in many cases 18th and 19th century grand portraiture, found holiday snapshots and slides from the 1970s and geometric abstraction. Chisholm distorts and isolates the figures in his paintings until a fixed sense of time and identity are rendered ambiguous.