The British artist John Virtue has painted abstracted landscapes with just black and white since 1978. On a DVD produced by the London National Gallery, Virtue says working in black and white forces him "to be inventive … to reinvent." Eschewing color "deepens my sense of what color there is … The sense of the actually of what I see … is best and more accurately and more actually conveyed by not having a palette of oil paint. The color would be a cul de sac."
This is one of John Virtue's London paintings, done while he was associate artist at the National Gallery (from 2003 to 2005). The National Gallery's website describes Virtue's paintings as having "affinities with oriental brush-painting and American abstract expressionism" and relating closely to "the great English landscape painters, Turner and Constable, whom Virtue admires enormously" as well as being influenced by the " Dutch and Flemish landscapes of Ruisdael, Koninck and Rubens".
Virtue doesn't give titles to his paintings, just numbers. In an interview in the April 2005 issue of Artist's and Illustrators magazine, Virtue says he began to number his work chronologically back in 1978, when he started to work in monochrome: "There's no hierarchy. It doesn't matter whether it's 28 feet or three inches. It's a non-verbal diary of my existence." His paintings are simply called "Landscape No.45" or "Landscape No.630" and so on.
This is one of John Virtue's London paintings, done while he was associate artist at the National Gallery (from 2003 to 2005). The National Gallery's website describes Virtue's paintings as having "affinities with oriental brush-painting and American abstract expressionism" and relating closely to "the great English landscape painters, Turner and Constable, whom Virtue admires enormously" as well as being influenced by the " Dutch and Flemish landscapes of Ruisdael, Koninck and Rubens".
Virtue doesn't give titles to his paintings, just numbers. In an interview in the April 2005 issue of Artist's and Illustrators magazine, Virtue says he began to number his work chronologically back in 1978, when he started to work in monochrome: "There's no hierarchy. It doesn't matter whether it's 28 feet or three inches. It's a non-verbal diary of my existence." His paintings are simply called "Landscape No.45" or "Landscape No.630" and so on.