Ross Skinner, won the 2014 Open Award of the Glebe Art Prize, as well as the 2009 Glebe Sesqui-centennial Painting Prize and regularly receives Highly Commended, Judges and People’s Choice Awards for his paintings, watercolours, and drawings.
His work is regularly selected as a finalist in many awards including the 2014, 2013, NSW Parliamentary "Plein air" prize, The Kogarah Art Prize, Hunters Hill Art Prize, to name a few, and this year his self portrait has been shortlisted in the 2014 Moran Portrait Prize Exhibition.

In my work, I tend to respond to subjects found in my immediate environment. These ...I can return to every day, even just to look and think, ...local landscapes, backyard shadows cast against a wall, or flowers in a vase against my studio wall...the ordinary and not so ordinary of the every day...

Working around Sydney´s harbour foreshores surrounding Rodd Island and looking through the Iron Cove Bridge towards Birkenhead Point and the Harbour beyond, Ross Skinner works en plein air with watercolour on paper and oil on canvas. Studying the changing temperment of the seasonal light and completing works around the Cove directly capturing the atmosphere and changing cloud patterns over the water towards Rodd Island and beyond.

On his still life paintings and watercolours, Ross comments:
Here is a subject I can study at night, when the noise and distractions of the day can be left behind, a subject that can be considered repeatedly.
I have tried to put down (on canvas and paper) that which strikes me, ...the fall of light and shadow, ...the arrangement of objects, ...a resonant colour note, in such a way as to reward continued contemplation, enriching our experience of the everyday and perhaps following in the footsteps of disparate, but to me, important artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Clarice Beckett and Frank Auerbach, who have worked from their own immediate environments. (Ross Skinner 2014)

Officially Opened by Katrina Cashman Assistant Director/Senior Curator Mosman Regional Gallery on Sunday 5^th October 2014

This is Ross Skinner´s second solo exhibition at Artsite Contemporary Galleries.