John virtue is a British born artist whose work focuses around painting monochrome landscapes running a fine line between abstraction and figuration. His paintings show a relation towards oriental brush-painting and American abstract expressionism but mostly they strongly relate to traditional English landscape painters such as Turner and Constable who Virtue strongly admires and finds inspiration from for his artwork. As well as these famous British artists Virtue also finds influence from the traditional Dutch and Flemish landscape paintings by, Jacob Issacksz van Ruisdael, Philip de Koninck and Peter Paul Rubens. Virtue works from the landscape he is living which today is London but when he first began his landscapes he lived in South Devon using Exe estuary as his subject matter. His most famous paintings are his ones depicting London skylines looking at iconic buildings that people would be familiar with such as St Paul's Cathedral and the NatWest Tower. He uses this particular subject matter so that his viewers can recognize and relate to the landscape even though the paintings are hazed and blurred as though looking at the city through thick smog.
All of Virtues paintings are produced onto canvas using white acrylic with black ink and shellac. Researching Virtue's technique and processes or working I found out that he begins his day by drawing from South Bank, the roof of Somerset House and finally from the roof of the National Gallery. His way of working also consists of walking and drawing. He would walk so that it would make a square in order to engulf the South Bank of the River Thames as well as the North Bank. He then goes on to work from these sketches in his studio using drawings that he is making every day. He comments of the fact that he has no intention to reflect on the history of London, he is mostly interested in showing abstractions from what he sees. Virtue does not see himself as a 'Londoner' but as an 'accidental' tourist.
Since 1978 Virtue has been using the same materials; black ink, shellac, gouache, earth and emulsion. However I have read that for the past 15 years he uses titanium white acrylic and black ink working onto a raw canvas. Virtue uses black and white because he sees colour as an 'unnecessary distraction'. It is how he sees it, deepening his sense of what colour is. He believes that using colour would immediately refer back to the work of Turner and Constable sucking you into a way of painting that is not personal and he wants to express how he sees the lanscape through his own eyes and not the eyes of tradition. His painting technique begins with him drawing loosely across the canvas with brushes which often ends up being wrong so he will then stop and build in the sky using the acrylic. I also found out that he likes to use J cloths to apply the paint or even his hands to mold it into the canvas. You then begin to see abstract forms between the black and white but when modelling these forms it is often incorrect so Virtue has to re-position on many occasions until eventually some of it will look like its starting to work.
What I find most interesting about Virtue's paintings are the forms and shapes created using simple monochrome tones and the textures created over many layers of paint and ink as he works over mistakes or starts again when it is not working.
(Landscape no.739, acrylic and shellac on canvas, 149 x 149 cm, 2004)
