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 still lifes constitute the most classical part of his oeuvre. Divested of their dates, they could be nineteenth-century works, their sole purpose being their mastery of technique to create images of enduring beauty. The exceptions to this general rule are two or three paintings of found objects – twisted bits of wood or dried indigenous plants. These paintings mimic the abstractionism that Roux’s landscapes found in natural forms and could not have been painted anywhere else but Southern Africa.