.: John Virtue - Contemporary Landscape Painter.

Born in Accrington, Lancashire 1947, known for his monolithic landscape paintings. His work rides a fine line between abstraction and figurative. A combination of American abstract expressionism meets Turner and Constable the infamous English landscape painters whom Virtue admires enormously.

Virtue tends to work from the landscape where he is living, he spent time in South Devon focussing on the Exe estuary as his subject. He then moved to London where he spends his days sketching primarily along the banks of the Thames capturing 'life on and around the river. He works solely in black and white. All of his paintings are created on large scale canvas' using white acrylic paint, black ink and shellac. Virtue is said to regard colour a superfluous to his needs.

Landscape No 710

Simon Scharma, art critic and historian commented on his London Landscape series, ' Virtue's London is more a battlefield than a playground….. there is a whipsaw excitement of the city; its rain-sodden, dirt caked, you tempered, beery eyed, jack hammered, traffic jammed, nervy exhilaration' (1)

John Virtue at work

I find Virtues loose, painterly style extremely inspiring, the pure scale of his paintings (some up to 14ft x 28ft), it astonishes me how he manages to capture such a deep sense of atmosphere and energy whilst having to constantly get down from his scaffolding to view his work as a whole. Having watched a documentary on him and seen him in action, he was filmed during his 2 yr position as The National Gallery, Associate artist 2003-5, the key learnings and inspiration I took from him was his rigour at sketching his subject before painting (Im not really there yet as a discipline, this will be discussed further in my drawing module !! need to work on it! ) the scale of his work is fantastically inspiring, I absolutely love it, and have started to explore working on larger canvas. This I find freeing as I can use wide brushes and be more expansive with my brush strokes. His use of light , I think, learning from him it doesn't need to be complicated, keep it simple, after all he's using only 2 colours on his palate!