Bruce Russell, New Paintings

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Squaresites

Bruce Russell is currently painting a major new series of works on a square format, his painterly themes deriving from places of fable and myth. The first works in this series featured in Russell's one-man show at the Beardsmore Gallery in London (21 March - 21 April 2007).

Squaresite no. 11, Castile
Oil and mixed media on canvas, 2007

Diamond Series

With these new works, Russell continues to develop his notions of abstraction, sign, symbol and metaphor, revisiting the techniques of his influential 1979 paintings in two time-honoured formats, the diamond and the circle.

These new paintings will be shown in New Orleans in 2008, alongside a major 50 year retrospective of Kendall Shaw (a native of New Orleans) who was one of the founders of the New York Pattern and Decoration movement of painters in the late 1970s. Russell first exhibited these paiintings as the inaugural show at the new Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge in February 2006.

Diamonds 2005

Zee, oil on canvas, 2005
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Circle Series

These circular pictures reveal the compositional depth of Russell's work, the familiar fragments, textures and puzzle parts in perpetual movement towards and away from the picture plane, jostling in the pictorial space with all the resonance and dissonant harmonies of the 21st century.

Russell writes, "The new circle works continue my fascination with what I call the 'meta' language of our densely mediated contemporary life, where the layering and editing protocols of electronic and digital communication have formed an entirely new kind of visual babble, akin in its democratising signifying to the Gutenberg revolution of the analogue age.  They are 'about' means rather than ends – the graphic symbols and icons that present, the glyphs, morphs and tropes which represent. The editing language of film is also influential – the wipes, fades, jump-cuts, fades and overlaps which give shape and meaning to visual narrative in time.

These paintings are very much hand crafted and improvisational, within a family of formal procedures which prevail from work to work. They are representations of our new information landscape, recorded gesturally through an ancient organic medium which runs eternally parallel to the silicon ghosts in our flatscreens, rather as Constable notated the movement of clouds, for instance.

And I look back and sideways as ever, to the nineteenth century Japanese printmaking tradition of extreme pictorial dynamics, to seventeenth century Dutch interiors of exquisitely arranged space and framing, and to take a specific typical element from the latter, to an endless absorption in the hermeneutic parallelisms of maps and charts and diagrams, with their strangely logical worlds of codes and legends.

The entire series on four size formats was shown in a major one-person exhibition at Leinster Gallery.

Circles 2005-2006

Exhibitions

Oz, oil on canvas, 2005
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Offa, oil on canvas, 2005
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