Blake Anthony Ross
800 N Franklin Rd
Greenville, SC 29617
Phone: 864.506.5462
I think there is a part of every introvert that aspires to mystery. If you will allow me to generalize, I think we are drawn to the idea of not being fully known. Even in the presence of those dearest to us - those who may even grasp our own personal dynamic to an extent that we might find shocking, we still treasure the notion that there will always remain some parts of us that are as yet unrevealed - a notion often paradoxically accompanied by a volcanic desire to be deeply, intimately known.
I feel this to a great degree. Fortunately for me, John writes in the Bible that we must diminish so that Jesus may become greater - Himself the perfect unison of the most mysterious & unfathomable with the utterly knowable & accessible. As for me, I feel great reluctance in describing myself in so public a place as this, feeling the egocentricity of the whole activity and lack of genuine relationship. But for the sake of convention, for the sake of my private inquisitors who visit this website, and for the sake of my own paradoxical desires, here are some life-historical things that are responsible for me creating the art you have found here.
Preeminently, it was music. Myself as a piano player was utterly foundational in the formation of my identity. It was as a child pianist that I learned how to draw energy from my own activities - the nurturing ground for my introversion. In high school I began making music with a local band and did so for about six years. Those experiences characterized those years of my life. Having spent a lot of time in a recording studio making albums and performing at popular local venues yielded a great deal of musical fruit, as well as a heaping mound of ambition. (I might even trace further back to my involvement with martial arts, which began well before I began playing the piano and informed a great deal of my view towards playing the piano and its value for my life. But I'll leave it at that.)
It was my freshman year at Clemson University in 2000 when my immediate family abruptly dissolved due to my father's unexpected death and the rampant use of alcohol in my family. I subsequently underwent a thorough, intense revision of my priorities and decided to leave computer science and pursue the visual arts while in college (a decision complexly but definitively attributed to my musical ambition). My computer science major can been seen as a manifestation of my long held computer skills, which may give insight to my trade work as a freelance web developer and designer.
This intense period of my life motivated me to start writing poetry only days after Dad's death - a prior untouched activity. This correlated with my involvement with visual arts. Having already learned something about how to nurture at the piano my own introspective and contemplative processes, the value of these visual, written, and musical art forms became intimately known to me through experience and were essential to my coping with the stress of the following years. Presently, it is my relationship with Christ, his followers, and my involvement with these arts that are tantamount to food and sleep in their daily importance for my life.
Today, I make meager income as a self-employed artist and web developer. It's a great gig. Being able to devote a large portion of my time to creating art is a long term goal, and I have been able to track gradual process in this over the past couple years. Since graduating with a BFA in May 2005, I have begun actively showing and selling paintings and photos. I have also been able to renovate the lower floor of my home to studio space. I have a painting studio, ceramic studio, and darkroom available to me at any time of the day - just a staircase away.
I also have somewhat of a love-disdain relationship with philosophy. I certainly could not appropriately write a biographical snippet of my life and not include something about my philosophical pursuits. But for now I will only offer that philosophy has long held a place of tremendous importance in my life, and I am in the process of reexamining the importance I have placed in philosophical cultivation at the expense of other priorities. Namely love, humility, and simplicity.
I happily claim each of these involvements as my own very special means to the pursuit of loving God and loving others: visual, written, and musical art forms, career, philosophical endeavors, and physical activities such as martial arts, drums, and ultimate frisbee. And it is this criterion of what is of true value that I seek to impose on all my activities. Know that the things on this website, even if only faintly, and even those works of poetry which are evidence of the struggles that I have experienced in my relationship with Our Father, are in some way a celebration of the creativity of our God which He chose to make fundamental to our nature when He created us in His beautiful likeness. So be it!
