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Nearly 50 years after Charles Ross began running on “Star Axis,” the artist’s gigantic paintings in the New Mexico desert are about to be completed.
By Nancy Hass
In TRAVERS L’HIVER, Charles Ross’s lifestyle belongs to an established New York multimedia artist of a secure vintage: the whitewashed SoHo loft with a comfortable studio on the back; a pair of soft, hairy dogs that he and his wife, the painter Jill O’Bryan, walk down Wooster Street in a cool place, in front of the storefronts of wrought iron department stores that were little more than steel scrap when he first arrived in town in the mid-1960s after reading mathematics and sculpture at the University of California , BerkeleyArray are still Chanel and Dior outposts. In the evening, they can move to one or two galleries in Chelsea, then stay for dinner at Omen, the Japanese food place that has been on Thompson Street since the 1980s, nodding the stalwarts of a city scene that has long eaten the little ones: the littleest: the most 92, has a sake with the expressionist summary David Salle, 67; musician Laurie Anderson, 73, at the bar, with his hair bristling with gray.
But at dawn, one April, when the weather began to break, those external symptoms suddenly disappear. A long flight and a bumpy trip 3 hours later in the bruised, red clay-encrusted Dodge Dakota, which regularly remain in a long-term parking lot at Albuquerque Airport, Ross and O’Bryan are halfway through a steep table, at the base of “Star Axis,” the 11-story observatory at the sandstone , bronze, earth, granite and stainless metal in which RossArray, one of the last men of the generation of so-called earthmoving artists, worked frequently since designing in 1971. Although everything will be completed, wait, until the end of 2022. He’ll be 84. “When I’m in New York, ” he said. “I’m just waiting.”
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