Edward Walker Ross, called Ed by those who knew him, favored experimentalism, incorporating a range of materials such as Plexiglass, crayons, metal, colored pencils, pens, wax, and string into his work. Despite the myriad mediums, his creations were still very formalist and Minimalist.
Ross was born in Clinton, South Carolina, in 1926. Some sources mistakenly cite 1923 as when he was born, but evidence of his true birthdate can be found in his 1945 draft card which listed him as nineteen years old and working for the National Maritime Union in New York City. After enlisting in 1946, Ross was deployed to Europe. Upon military discharge in 1948, he enrolled in the Atlanta College of Art where he would spend most of his career, though he did also attend the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco (now the California College of Arts) in 1949. When Ross returned to his Atlanta alma mater, he worked on completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts and served as the head of the painting department from 1965 until his death in 1976.
As a student, Ross’ artistic focus was on ordinary rural and urban scenes like other post-Regionalist folks, but he still featured a few abstract patterns. He exhibited throughout the Southeast and even in national exhibitions like the Butler Art Institute Annual in Ohio. Ross’ brief stint in San Francisco cemented his focus on abstraction, and the rest of his time in Atlanta was spent exploring inquiry, novelty, and philosophy through painting, drawing, and sculpture. In fact, he became very disagreeable with the idea of portraying illusory subject matter. Much of his work consisted of repeating the same pencil stroke across great swaths of paper, varying the shape, pressure, color, or curve of lines. Ross later aptly called these drawing motifs, which resembled handwriting, “readings.” His career would include scratch, line, wallpaper, and pounded readings.
His most popular works have been his Modernist paintings: large abstractions featuring a configuration of shapes in muted, blended tones with “calligraphic” gestural brush strokes. His Abstract Expressionist contemporaries and acquaintances, respectively Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, had introduced questions to the art world about how art could be used to express identity and how art could be valued by its viewers. As an art educator, the ability to communicate about art and through art would have been important. It followed that Ross was preoccupied with art as a direct metaphor for written language, that he was asking questions by making art with the “look of a beginning, rather than of an end,” and that he would value the very act of creating “surface markings” more than the final product. Even his futuristic yet archaic three-dimensional pieces, which became his staple in the late sixties, held this textual theme.
In the last ten years of his career, Ross’ work became incredibly personal, and he was wary of exhibiting outside the South, even quoted saying he would wait for New York to “come to him, and on his terms.” Ross had three solo exhibitions at the High Museum in 1967, 1973, and 1977, but did not find purchase outside the South. Still, his contributions to the art world were significant. The old, esteemed, private institution of the Atlanta College of Art provided an element of prestige to its students and faculty, but the culture was “stagnant” compared to the fast-paced national art world. According to some scholars, Ross, who desired to create what he had “never seen or been aware of,” brought the avant-garde to Atlanta the same way Jasper Johns did to South Carolina.