John Charles Roach, a retired Naval officer and local artist from Mount Sidney, Va., will exhibit “Selected Works: Drawings and Paintings” in the Cleo Driver Miller Art Gallery at Bridgewater College now through Aug. 25.
Roach graduated from the French National Academy of Fine Arts in Paris and has gained acclaim as a naval artist.
The show is a collection of his drawings and paintings dating as far back as 1964 and ending with several water colors he completed in 2014. Many of the pieces have Navy or ship themes along with drawings from his world travels.
Roach says that he “sees himself as a documentarian, a recorder of history.”
In the late 1970s, Roach was asked to create a large memorial mural of the battleship Arizona (BB 39) for the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center. He also completed a collection of 26 paintings of U.S. submarines titled “Fast Attacks and Boomers” for the fast attack Los Angeles-class subs and the Ohio-class Tridentmissile subs.
Roach earned a master’s degree in art history and fine arts from The American University in Washington, D.C.
The Miller Gallery is located on the second floor of the Alexander Mack Memorial Library. The Gallery is open 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday – Friday.
Bridgewater College is a private, four-year liberal arts college located in the Central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Founded in 1880, it was the state’s first private, coeducational college. Today, Bridgewater College is home to more than 1,800 undergraduate students.
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