Conversation with Chris Ross Dick.

Interview by Adeline Gregoire.

Christopher Ross-Dick is a Visual Artist from Trinidad and Tobago. A graduate of the University of the West Indies St. Augustine (Visual Arts Programme, 2017) he has been consistently painting for the past 5 years, with participation in 2 recent group shows: A shot to the Ego (2020) and Relative (2021) alongside a collective of younger contemporary artists, from Trinidad & Tobago (Kriston Banfield, Khaffi Beckles, Bianca Peake, Elechi Todd). A massive achievement for any artist amidst the limitations and restlessness of the global covid-19 pandemic…

Encouraged and supported by his father to pursue Art-making from an early age, Christopher or Chris, fondly remembers his earliest memories of Art: watching his dad sketch outside the family home, his father’s gift to him of a Van Gogh painting print of “Tree” which he keeps close, insightful conversations with Trinbagonian career artist Jackie Hinkson for his A-level research project…the many, not-so-minute details, which light the way for an aspiring artist.

At 26 years old, Chris Ross-Dick approaches his artistic practice with an inspiring level of discipline, rigour and a whole lot of reading. About everything. He readily cites the metaphysical, theories of time and space, Caribbean literature, and great writers/artists of the region such as Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Eddie Bowen. In the same breath, he speaks with admiration of his teachers: the ones he’s met, like Sabrina Charran and Nikolai Noel and those whom he’s studied extensively: Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Manet…

During the months of May/June this year, I had the absolute pleasure of visiting Chris in his studio, to talk about his new series of paintings for the exhibition “Spirit”. As in his earlier works such as Abel, Bois Man (2018) and his signature “corner paintings” like Green Emblem (2020), Ross-Dick is making a deliberate decision to reinvent the all-powerful, perfectly white canvas. He wants to challenge its structure, test its limits, affect, saturate and recreate it. New textures, bold contrasts, raw edges and unbridled strokes take the spotlight in this new show. Chris Ross-Dick invites us to become immersed in what he regards as “inspired work” and ultimately the process of illumination.

“Spirit” New exhibition by Chris Ross-Dick is now open to the public until Friday 7th July 2022, at the Normandie Hotel (Market) St. Ann’s, Trinidad & Tobago.

Your exhibition title is Spirit. You’ve defined this as a “creative, light, luminous being” also mentioning “the appeal to the unseen”. What are you investigating through this title?

It’s prudent to acknowledge the implicit influence on human behavior by unseen “forces”. The natural paradigm of spirit is not entirely natural to the human paradigm of navigating space as we are operationally physical currently. Part of my inquiry is better understanding then the quality of spirit and our perceptions of it, hence the allusions to light. I also want to address the question of if spirit informs the way we see the natural world. For instance, is this “essence” supplying us with ethical information? Is this a rational exchange? What physical activities facilitate this exchange? If we look at the space created in between these behavioral phenomena will the form of the spirit begin to show, like the puzzle piece left out? To extend the metaphor, isn’t it fascinating that gravity affects light? I guess I want to speak to what’s affecting things, maybe we can’t see it but we can see that things are being affected.

How do you think the essence of “the spirit” and / or “spirits” has found its way into your work?

I really don’t think that the artwork itself can truly house the essence of spirit. I like this question because it draws out some more explicit parameters of spirit. The difficulty here is where you have to use the thing to define the thing. Only a spirit can receive a spirit. So therefore the work innately has no spirit and so cannot exist as or with spirit, there’s no space for spirit in it. People do have a spirit however and if spiritual realities were to transcend conventional space, i.e the laws of physics, we could potentially receive information in a way that can be perceived as immediate.

The closest physical comparison to be made that I’ve found would be quantum entanglement or maybe quantum superposition (Quantum Physics principle). Quantum superposition is where an electron can be in two places at once. Quantum entanglement is where a photon with no physical connection to another photon, even in a distant location, can instantly affect the other. Now quantum phenomena can be observed, such as disturbance, synchronicity, distension and other such radical phenomena. The work may be able to display interaction with visible quantum phenomena such as photons, which we could then guess that it was affected by spirit, or something related.

I think the work acts as a boundary, it’s important to realize that the light only bounces off of the work and finds a place in your eyes. It was light before it hit the work, but when it enters the eye it may become a thought or a feeling. I guess I’m speaking to a sort of translation here, maybe even a transformation… In fact I think the work is truly lousy at testifying to the spirit’s nature. It is matter and it does the best job at saying what spirit is not. Why make work then? Well making work is a function of a spirit, that function being to create and manipulate material. So a spirit can enter me but not my work. As much as I am involved in the work, that is only so far as the spirit can go.

Could you explain the choice of burlap and other materials incorporated into your recent work?

When it comes to the burlap I just was looking for a more textured, fibrous surface to work on. Rough grained, unprimed linen kind of provides this surface but it’s more subtle and a lot more expensive and hard to come by in Trinidad. I do still think about some of the structural stretcher bars with corners and round canvases etc. but they require a lot more time in the making. Additionally, while I’m working with wood the sawdust gets into the wet paint, so I can’t paint and do carpentry simultaneously…

I’m working out a practical solution that doesn’t disrupt the production of paintings and slow the amount of images I can process at once, since there are so many that I want to develop. I’m thinking through more raw wooden materials as opposed to finely dressed and cubed wooden shapes provided by traditional hardwares.

In terms of other materials, for the most part just traditional painting media. I like to think about all the material used in painting. From the type of wood, to where the pigment comes from, to the colour of the copper tacks behind or around the painting.

How do you feel about these new works?

I really like them, I like the scale, they feel like a return to figuration for me (which is a reprieve from the pressure of recognition that abstraction brings). I mostly relate to them as a technical achievement but I do find them beautiful. I think they are really progressing in the way that they interact with light, and it’s really gratifying that some of the ideas in my head, really seem to connect to some kind of theoretical law of luminosity, whether or not the metaphors are truly related.

What would you like the viewer/ us to take away from these new pieces?

There’s nothing to take, enjoy the moment of seeing or not seeing. If you got something new it didn’t come from the painting. Maybe admire them enough to purchase one or two. Come tell me what you see, talk to me about what you are thinking. If it is in you, open up and be honest about your inner reality. Ideally. Or tell someone else. Write an essay or a book. Make a painting. I like genuine responses, I can’t say I haven’t seen people respond to art with fabrications…

“But still, the only thing we ever really see is light.”

Chris Ross-Dick

Artist Bio/

Christopher Ross-Dick is a Visual Artist based in Trinidad and Tobago. He studied Visual Arts at the University of the West Indies and after graduating he chose to center his practice around contemporary painting. He is currently focused on human perception in relation to light as his main line of artistic inquiry. This has led him to make both ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ work all based on observation of the physical effects of light hitting our eyes.

Christopher prefers to stretch his own canvas and create his own unique stretchers using woodworking skills that he taught himself. He also has a passion for organising his own art exhibitions based around conceptual ideas about the Caribbean identity and community. Because of this he has found himself
collaborating often with other local artists both young and old, veteran and emerging. Follow Chris Ross-Dick on Instagram @chrisrossdick

Bio courtesy the artist.