Landscape painting for me is not just about beautiful scenery, but also has a clear connection to the value I place on my relationship to natural places. Two of my earliest childhood memories are feeling the wind on my face, and the excitement of making art. To this day I find that my sense of being in the right place is when I am in the orderly chaos of nature, and when I am making art.
Painting for me is a kind of hypnotism, an intense concentration and focus of both my conscious and unconscious states. I drift constantly from conscious and deliberate decisions regarding form and craftsmanship, to unconscious responses to the subject matter, paint and canvas. At the same time that I am planning, executing and evaluating my painting, I am also frequently surprised as the creation process evolves in front of me. A certain amount of confidence and trust in the process is essential for me to be successful. Fear and self-doubt, the anti-muses of creativity, can derail a painting session rapidly. Still, it is also important for me to be able to be critical of my work without being self-critical in order to make improvements. My friend, Clint Brown, once remarked about a work in progress, “Either make it great, or destroy it trying.” That was great advice for me as there is a wonderful freedom in this attitude, a decision to risk failure as an important aspect of seeking success.
–Douglas Russell
Douglas Russell now retired as the gallery director of Fairbanks Gallery, and curator for the Department of Art in the School of Arts and Communications at Oregon State University .
Recently I've begun to explore the painting of birds. With feeders around our yard, and a designated natural area nearby, we see them everywhere and have been avian lovers for many years. I've been facinated by the detailing, and more recently, by the expression of painting these creatures. I expect that my future work will consider other brothers and sisters in the natural world, as well as the landscapes around us.
Russell's solo show, Incantations, was on exhibit at the Coos Art Museum in May of 2012. His work was juried into the 2012 All Around Oregon exhibit at the Corvallis Arts Center, and featured in a three-person landscape exhibit at the Philomath Historical Museum in December 2011-January 2012. Russell has also been juried in several Willamette Valley Juried Exhibitions, and participated in the Curators’ Night Out” exhibit at Linn-Benton Community College. Russell exhibits frequently with the Oregon State University Art Faculty in annual and traveling exhibits, and was juried into the Portland Art Museum Biennial under the alias of Parlando Rubato in the early 1980s.
In his role as gallery director Russell has curated and exhibited hundreds of artists and exhibits which have included the work of Bill Viola, Wayne Thiebaud, Jacob Lawrence, Lucinda Parker, Philip Pearlstein, Andy Warhol, Luba Lukova, Larry Kirkland, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Schmid, Tom Nakashima, Sue Coe, Rick Bartow, Harley Jessup, Edward Weston, Gordon Gilkey, Laura Ross-Paul, James Lee Hansen, Lee Kelly, Jerry Uelsmann, George Johanson, and Ruth Bernhard.