'Kells Rider'   18 x 23 inches  -  Mixed Media

Seamus Heaney writing......

Ross Wilson had not been very long at art college when I met him. He possessed in great measure the beginner's eagerness and had about him trace elements of the countryman’s gift for carrying the weather of his own locale into whatever company he happened to join. The small paintings which I saw then also transmitted a strong feeling for weather and ground and hovered nicely between record and abstraction. I liked the slight strangeness which I sensed in them, a certain not-at-homeless hunting the pigment.

I (also) saw an exhibition of drawings of writers … a number of these were not only fine likenesses but housed an altered energy of their own; in the best of them, the artist’s personality managed to hold its own against the weight of the medium - a fairly uncompromising charcoal - and impressed by a consistent pressure and ability to stand its ground in its own technical habits.

It is good, however, to see him moving himself on beyond the kind of drawing he has already made his own, and risking experiment with a more exposed allusive style. One wishes for him a continued onset of that “boldness in the face of the blank sheet” which constitutes the sine qua non of every artistic enterprise.