ARTIST'S STATEMENT - PAINTING
Frank Russell is a 52 year old painter of canvas for over 30 years, 15 years full time. Although well known for a tendency to work on/with found materials, his works are most often large (4'X6') acrylic or m/m on canvas or wooden panel. Abstract, non-objective more often that not, his paintings show an experienced master craftsman at the zenith of his skills and talent. Well collected, it is not unusual for his paintings to be sold immediately upon first exhibition.
Working in a fairly wide range of styles and influences, his more typical large-scale compositions "suggest" geometric
shapes underpainted and/or overlaid by more organic forms. Are these decisions about balance between order and chaos? These intriguing architectonic relationships consist of semi-symmetrical configurations of "flat", interlocking areas of color, many partially obscured by neutral tones of beige, taupe or off-whites.
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Other works suggest a more classic, painterly Abstract Impressionist vein, clearly informed by physical landscape and the spiritual and esthetic legacy of primitive peoples, Native Americans or aboriginal artists who produced the earliest visual record of life on Earth. Cave paintings for the 21st Century?
Russell's apparently metaphysical preoccupation with geometric "order" is expressed in soft, luminous expanses of color achieved through a gestural and fluid layering of acrylic paint. Softened lines, rarely straight, seem illusionistically suspended above streaked, neutral fields overlaid with wild drips, daubs, spontaneous splashes and blobs of color or brilliant white. This invited spontaneity is effectively counterbalanced by the casual precision of underlying or overlaying elements implied by geometric forms.
Frank describes his artmaking process as "a series of invitations to accidents" and remarks that so much of his work on canvas (as well as sculpture) is simply "an ongoing evolution of the decision-making process". What stays? What goes? Why?
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