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
The painting process itself was more painstaking than is typically associated with working en plein air. Roux’s more naturalistic style and desire to capture the actual form and tone of the landscape he was painting precluded the impassioned projection of his own emotions onto the canvas in a single session. For Roux, the landscape itself was the bearer of emotion. At least, the painting had to represent something that the viewer could recognise as the essential nature of the subject. That required him to paint methodically over several days, slowly building up the formal features and tonal effects he wanted to capture. 
Apart from landscape painting, which forms the bulk of his artistic output, Roux was also an accomplished portrait and still-life painter. His portrait work began on the farm in Southern Rhodesia with studies of his acquaintances at the mission. In contrast to many European depictions of African subjects, his portraits are not caricatures of ‘exotic natives’, but fully sympathetic renderings of fellow human beings. To the extent that the colonial encounter is present at all in these paintings, it comes through in his subjects’ barely perceptible melancholy. But these are nevertheless people with autonomous lives and, in the case of the younger ones, unknown futures yet to be lived in all their complexity.