Late artist's ghostly paintings hover over canvas

By Kathleen Mellen

Published on March 30, 2007

So innovative were the techniques used by the late John Roy to create his paintings that his achievements, over the course of his career, indelibly influenced all the artists and students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where Roy taught art for 30 years. In fact, according to Trevor Richardson, director of UMass' Herter Gallery, where Roy's paintings are now on view, his body of work represents an important, if not yet widely recognized, contribution to late 20th-century American painting.

Roy, who died in 2001, was always reluctant, Richardson says, to rely on modes of simple representation for his objects of interest, so he developed several unique methods to manipulate color, resulting in highly original pieces.

His early fascination with color theory and perception, developed while a student at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., resulted in what became a lifelong artistic interest for Roy, who was born in Springfield. That, coupled with an inherent interest in developing technologies in photography and the computer, enabled him to create new methods of transcribing information to create paintings of "extraordinary visual delicacy and tact," Richardson said.

"The history of modernist art in the 20th century offers many examples of artists and movements that have embraced the painterly possibilities offered by new technologies," writes Richardson in the exhibit's brochure. "For John Roy, photography and, later, the computer were crucial to the process by which his paintings were created." But, adds Richardson, the photographic origins of Roy's paintings were secondary to his "preoccupation with the analysis and reconstruction of visual reality."

His methods involved transcribing visual information contained in photographs directly onto the surface of a canvas, while distilling colors into what appear as "layered washes" that give his images a ghost-like quality. He even achieved a method, through the use of the computer, by which he could assign color to movement. In other words, you can see in his paintings a sort of after-shadow of a subject's progression through space, over time. For example, in his work "Pink Cow, Green Cow," which is typical of this technique, different colors represent the cow's movement over time. Roy's bovines "do not so much occupy the surface of the painting as haunt it," Richardson writes. "As vivid as the images are to the eye, they tend to hover on the canvas without quite seeming to take root in its material existence."

"Order and Intuition: Paintings, Prints and Photographs by John Roy" will be on view through April 7 at the Herter Art Gallery, located in Herter Hall on the UMass campus. Hours are Mondays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. For information, call 545-0976.