About me...

Name: John Keith Ross
Born: Falkirk, Scotland 1960
Educated: Bantaskine Primary. Falkirk High School. Glasgow School of Art.
e-mail: keith@criticalart.com

Dislikes:

• The art world
• pretentious tossers
• politicians
• religion / supersition
• rude people
  

Likes:

• Skill / Craftsmanship
• Logic
• Science
• Truth
• Fun / Happiness

"...artists have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it..."

In the event that you might be interested....
this is my story so far....

My name is Keith Ross. I was born in Falkirk , Scotland in 1960. I went to Glasgow School of Art in 1979 and graduated in 1983. At least I think it was then, it's a long time ago. Anyway I gained a BA Honours degree in Fine Art.

I specialsied in Fine Art doing large scale oil paintings of a mainly political and socially critical theme. The 80's where a pretty interesting time for politics.

Although I love oil paint, I was unhappy with the relavance of the medium and the gallery system in general going into the 21st century and was on the look out for something more appropriate.

In 1987 I was on a computer course while working at Glasgow Garden Festival. There I discovered that Computers had moved on somewhat and that you could draw with them. I did some research on the subject, sold 4 drawings to get the money together and bought my first computer; an Amiga 500 which I still look back at fondly as a brilliant machine for its time, easlily surpasing the PCs graphical abilities.

Within a few weeks of working on the machine and discovering what it could do, I sent some demo work to video games companies and starting getting freelance work from them. I did this for over 8 years. This involved producing sprite animations and backdrop tiles using Deluxe Paint 3 (great program) on the Amiga.

Times change and eventually the PC took over as the more powerful graphics machine so I reluctantly moved over to it. It did have one saving grace, a piece of killer software called 3d Studio. An excellent 3d animation program that I used quite a lot.

About this time I started doing an evening class in 3d animation at Glasgow College of Commerce which was really great.There the class worked on producing animations for ROBOTIX 97 an exhibition held in Glasgow on Robotics and Artificial intelligence. I produced a number of small animations using 3d Studio 4 and 3d Studio Max.
[ for more on the Animations Click here ]

As fate would have it a good friend on the course, Michael Kerrigan, was involved in setting up an Internet cafe in Ramsgate ( Seadrive Internet Cafe ) in the South of England. He asked me if I would like to paint a mural on the arched ceiling of the Cafe. It was a big job but I agreed to take it on with the assistance of Stasia Rice another graduate from art college.
[ for more on the Mural Click here ]

To cut a long story short after finishing the mural I got a job offer there, moved down from Glasgow and worked as a web designer come internet assistant.

I currently work as a full time web designer.