J. F. Roux
Roux thought that the act of artistic creation resides in the decisions that the artist makes about what to leave out from the represented world, so that a painting is the product of the artist’s considered choices about what forms and colours to emphasise. There are some early paintings at Langebaan of fishing boats and later, from a trip with Margot to Sicily, of dwellings. Roux was also commissioned on occasion to paint pictures of farm houses. But on the whole, his landscapes represent nature in all its timelessness, stripped of any trace of human intervention.
J. F. Roux
Roux’s painting box contained the classic mid-nineteenth-century synthetic pigments: cobalt blue, viridian, and cadmium yellow. After choosing his tonal range, he would paint thickly, in layered brush strokes, sometimes using a palette knife in an impasto style. Like the impressionists, he made no attempt to hide the brushwork or the process of artistic creation. But he differed from classical impressionism in mixing his colours more thoroughly and painting with smoother transitions between the different parts of the subject. There is to this extent a more naturalistic feel to his paintings, without, however, any attempt at photographic realism.