Merl Ross is an abstract painter born and raised in San Francisco, CA and currently lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Merl’s work has been exhibited throughout California as well as nationally and her paintings are in numerous private and public collections across the United States and abroad. Two of Merl Ross’ paintings were included in the de Young Museum Open Exhibition. She studied Design at UCLA and received her BA and MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley where Merl studied under Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, and Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Awards include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Maybelle Toombs Award for Painting, a Merit Award from the Berkeley Art Center National Painting Competition and others. Merl currently teaches painting at her studio in Berkeley. She taught painting at California College of the Arts for 25 years and previously taught drawing and painting at UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice and at the Academy of Art University.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My art lives where memory and experience of place, both real and imagined, intersect. The need to untangle and express the less knowable aspects of one’s imagination is key to my work. My paintings explore the ambiguity of spacial relationships, along with lyrical forms and fields of color. Nature is not depicted literally but absorbed into my visual language of biomorphic shapes forming a sense of movement and possibility in imagined places where thought and memory converge. My process is stimulated by that moment when painting can trigger the unexpected, creating an atmosphere filled with mystery and vestiges of memory that engage the present.