L.L. Ross is an interdisciplinary artist. Having beat the every increasing migration, she has lived in the Hudson Valley for the last 2 decades.
Formerly from a Manhattan apartment and Williamsburg studio, her love of nature brought her back to the upstate N.Y. She attended Bard College in the 70s. When she left the city, her home overlooking a nature preserve in the Hudson provided her solice from the high pressure art world of the city. Now, her hone and studio are a quick drive from the city of Hudson.
Needless to say, in creating her art, she inhales the Hudson Valley Landscape, transforming the organic into contemporary drop dead fascinating work. She mixes a variety of skills—painting, assemblage, and the ancient Asain geomancy of feng shui. Standing apart from much of the current art scene, in searching for a classification to best describe her work, Ross might defer to “magical realism.” her own spin on the tendencies found in the magical realism movement of literature and especially film. Art critic Franz Roh defines magical realism as a form of visual art that brings extreme realism to the depiction of the mundane. This approach reveals the “interior” mystery rather than imposing external features onto the everyday. And that’s exactly what LL does: she reveals the interior mystery of her subjects.
Recently however, a polished film maker currently working on a film about Ms. Ross, her studio, her community, spontaneously referred to her as a “Real Magicalist’. Ross likes the term.
“I think that is spot on. I am boots on the ground in many practical ways, but I live in an alternative reality most of the time”.
Born to a preforming violinist mother and a radio/ film actor father in New York City, LL was quickly wisked away to spent a somewhat glamorous childhood in Palm Beach, Florida - the Palm Beach of the old garde wealth- the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor, The Kennedies, The Dodges, Merriweather Post. Laura Lee would say she was oblivious to all the glitterati. Her Palm Beach as a kid was the enchanted Lake Trail Bike Path. She spent glorious hours, bare foot on her blue Schwin peddling past manicure gardens and lakeside yachts. By third grade, she was a star student in cursive writing. Her script was so beautiful that friends paid her quarters to create personalized messages to their sweet hearts. To this day, one of her best sellers are her personalized one of a kind hand wrought cards. Also at this time, her "Elephant Among Vines” poster paint painting was hung in the world famous Norton Gallery. The elephant on a sponge painted ground, with a sedan seated wiggle pserons is not unlike her work present paintings. The painting that won first prize in the children's show and hangs now in the “parlor” of her home. She laughs that the texture of the painting and the 1920s vintage wall paper are not that far apart in their “Vuillard-ness”.
The Sunshine state greatly influenced her palette. She has never been scared of bold, color schemes. Subdued palettes are evident in her recent work, but flamingo pink is as much at home as Paines Gray.
After Bard college, LL first went to Boston where The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and life in a huge loft in a fringe neighborhood of Roxbury, anchored her untradition future. Next there was a brief marriage, but a lot timeless paitings produced in a log cabin without runnˆng water and only a wood stove for heat . Here, in coastal Maine, she started a much respected visual arts paper with friends, VISIONS. With her parnters, the younger gereration sought out great art minds like Lucy Lippard, an acclained early contempory art critic. Lippard helped promote a “site specific’ show sponsored by the magazine. As co-editor, L. L. sought out and interviewed Lois Dodd, Katherine Porter, Rudy Burckhard, all Main-iacs in the tradition of Marin and Nevelson.
It was a wonderful art community in Maine for a young artist. Her interview subjects became long fast friends and mentors. Her friendship with Katherine Porter being the most significant of all her artist associations. Katherine’s work somehow allowed Ross to take explosive color as serious color. K.P. gave her a huge studio. Burckhard put her in films and purchased her paintings. Ross is still close to Porter and Dodd. L.L. also took a stint as the art critic for the Maine Times, one of those progressive great small papers of the time. It was through The Maine Times, she met Katherine Bradford. Bradford was also a writer for the paper. Bradford found fledgling show of L.L.’s work hung in an interior design store and gave it a rave review. Ms. Bradford remains a good friend and great supporter of her work to this day. L.L. loves that she still has work of all of the Maine artists from that time. “We would all swap work - ah, the art world before investment bankers”.
The bold leap to Manhattan followed a divorce and a coming to terms with sobriety. L.L. lived many years in the 1980’s New York City/East Village/ and on to Williamsburg art scene.Some of the artists breaking rules and influencing the next generation of “out of the box” art warriors were Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabble, Sandro Chia, Yvonne Jacquette and Katherine Porter.
Also during her time in New York, artist like Gonzales Torres and Portia Munson (now another upstate neighbor) and many others were making new claims to art as assemblage. To this day, Rosses work becomes “encrusted” with collage materials or breaks ou of two dimensions to out and out assmeblage. With whimsy almost always present in her style, she found and loved the whimsical figurative yet never superficial work of Hollis Seigler. It gave her joy to find an contemporary artist's figures akin to her own representation of women crying crocodile tears into bettering martini glasses. Figures in Rosses work are often more of Katie Keene than Phillip Pearlstein.
By the turn of the century, all roads led back to The Hudson Valley. In self -imposed seclusion for over a decade, she found her way out of angst and into a recent series of “real magical” landscapes. Often painted in plein air, they are noted for the rich blues and greens when by the water or dusty earth hues when fall arrives. Her sense of the line, influenced by the cursive script learned in 3rd grade and Asian the use of primarily water color and Asian Summi brushes has a flowing sense of serenity and yet still full of the youthful “verve” Bradfrod once proclaimed.
"My work from natures is about so much more than landscape. I incorporate my interest in the reductive and expansive qualities of the five elements theories as set forth in Black Sect Tantric Feng Shui. To me, Feng Shui was the ORIGINAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT. Using F.S. and other means (water colors mixed with the actual stream water) I hope to bring attention to our local and global environment. I hope to stress the urgency to preserve what we have, especially here in the Hudson Valley I hope to call home forever. I think artists cannot turn a blind eye but we also can’t be didactic. It doesn’t work. I guess I believe giving beauty to the viewer with a lilting unconscious theme of preserve, conserve, every little part is your part to play - is the way I chose to encourage.
In the art world today, Ross loves the work of El Anatsui and Nick Cave. It is these artist with whom she finds a kinship to recyle, turn detritus to shmmering gold and yet to retain activist stature on an individual artist platform. As LL says, “I’m trying to be spiritual person in an earthly body. I am hoping to influence with a positive path now that I am on one myself."
LL says, “I believe in magic. I believe intuition trumps rationalism. I try to learn from my dreams.”
During a particularly dark time in her life, a time when having been regarded as a dumb blonde, sex object and “mistress only” material, she found help in Milton Ericsonian therapy, a hypnosis-based treatment. Her therapist, a man she claims turned her life around, once mentioned in trance " men should lay roses at her feet”. Around this time Bradford gave Ross use of her Williamsburg studio for several the summers. One day, on her way to the studio, LL saw a local florists put out a bucket filled with roses. She bought one rose to just start drawings. She often begins drawing somewhat traditionally from nature to see where it will take her.
Her flower paintings are no longer restricted to roses. As the wound healed, a plethora of botanicals found their way into a dance: peonies, echinacea, irises, and most recently, while undertaking a commission asking for native Hudson Valley wild flowers, Ross discovered trillium. Now I am on a hunt to find colts foot, dutchman’s breeches, bleeding hearts as well arrow heads and the history of the Native Americans who came to the falls behind my studio to mine their “chert”. It is all part of the history of the land I cherish. It is all about bringing attention to wounds and giving tribute survival. My studio grouds were the summer camp grounds for the Mohicans, the story goes. And Schodack Island, which I look at from my kitchen table was their sacred island. There is a reason I am here”.
If that is magical thinking, she believes it.
On a more day to day leve, L.L. confesses to adoring clothes and textiles in general, especially elegant vintage. One artist friend recently stayed at her home only to emerge saying “It was like being in a Villard painting”. Other friends who like her "never wear it twice" outfits suggest she post them daily. That is a little too much she demure. Instead, an more elevated inspiration struck her with the thwarting of a crazy mad impulse. While living in Manhattan ,one day riding the M4 down Fifth Avenue heading to a mindless, underpaid temp. job, she passed Fifth Avenues Bergdorf Goodman. “I loved every dress in the window.. I felt like smashing the bus window and the store window and running off with all the dresses, blood stains or no.”
Instead, as the afore mentioned therapy helped her channel, she went to her studio and created hundreds and hundreds of dress skethes. Not fashion sketches, but happy lady swirled into paintings and collages. One portfolio is enclosed in a drawer from a Victorian Steamer Trunk, complete with its snaps and sashes and musty cedar smell. “The Dress” series continues today. For this series, she bows in tribute to Hollis Siegler and Hollises forerunner, Florine Stettheimer. There was a time when one had to search for Florine Stettheimer. Ross wants young women artists to know that. "Woman before us have broken glass ceiling after glass ceiling. Many are just now getting recognized." Many of Ms. Rosses themes, like the roses and the dresses are recurring, reinvented and circle back to catch the early angst spiced up with the current joy.
At this stage of her artistic development, "the marvelous cacophony of Laura Lee” as noted by the film maker who brough us Real Magicalism is becoming a harmonious body of work. She paints with the energy of a young woman, but without the pain. She proclaims saving the environment as a great passion, but the Asian influence is about seduction leading to pleasure. Her belief in the yin is balanced with a mature appreciation of the Yang. It is with ecsquite beauty entwining with meaningful messages that she seeks to influence.
To follow her into her rustic studio these sensors spring valley days, she might turn to you to say “the rest of my life is going to be the best of my life - come on in. I want to share this. I have things to show you."