Jerry Ross is a journeyman painter with vision that informs his work in any style

JERRY ROSS is one of only a handful of truly grown-up artists inhabiting the art landscape of Eugene. He paints in oils - the granddaddy of artistic media - and he deals in subjects that are solid and mature, from European landscapes to thoughtful, evocative portraits. At a time when many artists are relishing the ephemeral, Ross is striving for substance.

Ross has been a presence in Eugene for more than 25 years. A decade ago, he conceived of and helped found the Salon des Refuses, the annual show of rejects from the Mayor's Art Show. He is a member of the New Zone Gallery, an art collective currently without a home outside of cyberspace. He has exhibited around Eugene and in Italy. Last year, he won the Mayor's Choice Award for a portrait in the Eugene Mayor's Art Show. A new exhibit of Ross' work, now at the Hult Center's Jacobs Gallery, shows Ross at his most - and occasionally least - profound. "Art in History, Science and Culture," as the exhibit is titled, also includes faux-scientific sculpture by Garner Britt. Practically a retrospective, taking in work from most of his career, Ross' side of the exhibit includes paintings of three distinct kinds, including portraits, landscapes and pastiches on Old Master paintings.

In any style, Ross is a journeyman painter, meaning he paints well and with feeling, with control of color and composition and structure and all the other nuances of the painter's game. But more than that, he paints with a power that wells up inside, whatever his subject happens to be. It is this force of vision that informs all his work and allows him to paint seductively and well in quite disparate works without seeming like a young artist still stylistically adrift. His most accomplished work may be portraiture. "Portrait of a Young Italian Woman" is a simple, direct view of a dark-haired beauty, her eyes locked on the viewer. The woman's face is articulate and well drawn. But her sweater is a simple, monochromatic field of greenish blue against a gold-ochre background. Only the face, modeled deftly with light and shadow, reaches into the third dimension.

Like much of Ross' work, this painting could be seen as a half-finished study. And yet the flat fields of green and gold force our attention perfectly on the woman's face, accenting its striking gaze. In the end, the image works as a wonderfully casual and even heroic bit of painting. More finished, and larger in vision as well as size, is Ross' 1992 "Dr. Panova." The white-smocked doctor, as beefy as a butcher, fills the frame, his large hands as prominent as his face, which is slightly averted into shadow. Again, Ross is spare in his use of color. The painting is practically monochromatic, warm umbers mixed with cool white, and at a distance has a slightly photographic quality. "Panova" is sharp, masculine and assured. Not entirely a pleasant person, by any means, but someone whose competence you might be forced to reckon with.

The second part of Ross' offering here is traditional landscape, mostly of quiet scenes in Italy, where he has lived and studied at various times. As with his portraits, the landscapes run the entire range, from sketchy to polished. The most articulate is a large canvas, "Firenze, Italy," depicting a traditional European cityscape of tiled red roofs stretching in deliberate perspective toward a distant church and blue horizon. The painting is bright, cheerful, and - like the dour Dr. Panova - slightly photographic in feel. More impressionistic are a couple of smaller canvases of Italian landscapes, both done in muted tones with large, quick dabs from the brush. Both paintings could easily pass for Oregon landscapes, anchored as they are in deep forest greens. The most unusual aspect of this show is a group of paintings inspired by the late Renaissance and Baroque, history painting of the sort that is wildly out of fashion today - those tightly composed, luridly depicted scenes of classical antiquity, with toga-clad Romans and marble columns and great cavalry battles and the like.

Fascinated by their complexity, Ross has taken these familiar images and sketched them into nearly abstract forms; his finished paintings look at first glance like uncompleted works from a Baroque atelier, the paint still wet and smudged with charcoal sketch lines. In "Battle Between Constantine and Licintius," for example, Ross takes on an image by Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, then turns the confrontation into a quick, nearly featureless sketch. In this painting of a painting, Ross relies on the composition of the Rubens original as a springboard for his own interpretation.

As with a lot of postmodernist "appropriation," the painting succeeds and falls flat at the same time. Its strength comes from the idea of building on an image that is so deeply rooted in our visual past that it serves as unconscious foundation; Ross, here, is playing with a cultural archetype.

But where this painting fails, in the end, is where most such appropriation falls short. It's an easy effect, one that relies too much on concept and too little on its own inherent virtues. Once you know this is taken from Rubens - and you can enjoy feeling slightly superior for figuring this out - you have grasped most of what Ross' painting has to say.

Invoking the Old Masters, in the end, can be just a cheap trick. Overall, though, this is a fascinating show, and it's to the artist's credit that he's willing to exhibit tentative, even experimental, work alongside his most accomplished pieces, showing us the ebb and flow of ideas that power the best art.

July 15, 2001