Ross Ford

Each of these figures is a face. This practice began as doodles in my notebook margins. I would draw faces and heads, trying to show different expressions in each. Given space I might draw whole figures but often it was just the heads. Notebooks became a gallery of subtle expressive moments. By the time I was in college it had progressed to pages filled with irregular rows of heads.
In 2005, I began creating paintings based on selected drawings from my books. As I completed more paintings I began to notice the steady, chaotic transformation o f the heads. Once I had painted the more obvious faces, the less obvious, more abstract faces began to interest me more. This interest fed back into the drawing process and the shapes began to shift even further. I began to draw more faces when preparing for each new painting, looking for shapes and figures that I hadn’t seen yet. After several hundred paintings, it had evolved into code, multiple face shapes overlaid into a complex abstraction, pulsing figures with multiple eyes, contours of features from different angles. Sorting through hundreds of drawings trying to find ‘the one’ led me to study the structure of the facial code, comparing the feature placement, angles, the linear “cons...

BA Hampshire College 2000
MA University of Florida 2004

Solo Shows

2011
Durham Art Guild – DAG SunTrust Gallery, Durham, NC

2010
Iterative Expression – GAB Studio, Miami, FL
Selected Works – AE District, Miami, FL

2008
Recent Paintings presented by Butter Gallery – Century Hotel, Miami Beach, FL

Group Shows

2014
The New Post-Literate: Asemic Writing, Atelier Showroom, Rijika, Croatia
Project Room, Brisky Gallery, Miami, FL
N.E.W., Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh, NC
Spring Group, Lasheras+Elliot, Mexico City, MX
Uncharted, Trespass Gallery, Clarksville, TN
Case Studies, Block Gallery, Raleigh, NC
2013
Ternary, The Carrack Modern Art, Durham, NC
2012
GAB Studio Basel 2012, GAB Studio, Miami, FL
12x12x2012, Golden Belt, Durham, NC
This & That, Bakehouse Art Center, Miami, FL
The Art of the Auction, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Chapel Hill Public and Cultural Arts Office, Chapel Hill Town Hall, Chapel Hill, NC
VAE Exchange Gallery, Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh, NC
Art No Bull, 311 Martin Gallery, Raleigh, NC
2011
GAB Studio Basel 2011, GAB Studio, Miami, FL
12x12, Golden Belt, Durham NC
Forum: Works by VAE’s Artists’ Groups, Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh, NC
State of the Art/Art of the State, Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC
The...