Johnnie Winona Ross is an acclaimed American abstract painter known for his minimalist, luminous canvases inspired by the landscape of the American Southwest. 

Johnnie Winona Ross (b. 1949)

Journey/Passage 1991
64 x 61 inches

Acrylic, oil, rust/canvas
 signed and dated verso

Exhibition History:
R.H. Love Contemporary, Chicago, Illinois, March – April 1992 (solo exhibition)

Ross was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1971 and completed his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1973.

Before painting full-time, Ross had a distinguished career in art education. From 1977 to 1999, he taught at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, eventually serving as the chair of the Art Department. In May 1999, he resigned his academic position to dedicate himself fully to his studio practice and moved ot Taos, New Mexico.

From his New Mexico studio he explores the vocabulary of minimalism and the complexity of rendering the experience of the high desert in pure abstraction.

At first glance his paintings and works on paper appear to be largely absent of color, but looking more closely the layers upon layers of subtle earthen colors reveal themselves.

While his paintings appear starkly minimalist at first glance, they feature an intricate, labor-intensive process of  applying multiple layers of glazed, earth-toned pigments and minerals, then shaving the surface with a straight razor to expose underlying chronological layers of color.

He finishes his work using a traditional potter’s stone—a technique borrowed from ancient Pueblo pottery makers—to achieve a hard, translucent, and softly reflective sheen. 

This interspersed layering of color, melding opacity and transparency, and building depth through repetition, are the integral elements of his work.

As artist and writer Kate Beck notes, 

“This process of painting, scraping and repainting establishes a subliminal dynamic between counteractive elements – presence/absence, structure/freedom, resistance/release, richness/ austerity-that ultimately allows an elegant integration of romantic irony to permeate his surfaces.  The viewer is quietly entranced by his purity of form, light and the suggestion of what lies beneath.  This is the artist’s process, his hand.”

He now exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and throughout Northern New Mexico. He has been the recipient of many grants and awards, including a Fulbright Artist in Residence and a Gottlieb Foundation Support Grant.

Among the many public collections holding work by Ross are the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; the Sori Arts Center of Jeollabuk-do, Jeonbuk, Korea;  the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM; the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM. 

 Biographical sources: Tamarind Institute, Lannan