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
In keeping with Hahn’s teaching and, before that, the methods taught by Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Roux would begin every landscape painting by closely observing his subject. Standing in the veld next to his easel, he would examine the spatial relations between the foreground he would typically use to draw the viewer into the painting and objects further away. Often, he would get to know his subject by first painting a watercolour or simplified oil-on-board picture. This also helped him to determine the tonal effects he wanted to capture. Once he had understood his subject through close examination in this way, he would map out the main features of the landscape onto flax canvas. If a subject was particularly complex, he would draw gridlines on the canvas to assist him.