“Something Just Popped Into Focus”: An Old Interview with Seattle Collage and Mixed Media Artist Russell C. Smith from 2016!

Sometimes Euphoria. Mixed Media on wood. (2015)

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Xavier:  Please introduce yourself and your work for us.

 

Russell C. Smith:  I’ve lived on Capitol Hill in Seattle since the late 1980s. I create collage and mixed media art, and have been showing around Seattle for a few years now, after I turned a corner with my work several years ago. How people reacted to my work changed after I began a series of black and white collages on watercolor paper, and that was the beginning of turning a corner Along with the title people in the series, I’ll often include a commentary on who they are and what they’re doing, as well as the title of the piece.

For years I worked on abstract color collages, and something just popped into focus when I started the black with the black and white series. My newer pieces are large color mixed media work on canvas and wood.

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Russell C Smith – Holding Fortified with strong coffee,

a new hairdo, and PoohBear, Lulu was ready to face the world.

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Xavier:  How long have you been working as an artist?

 

Russell C. Smith:  I’ve worked in collage art since the mid-1980s, mostly abstract, and recently mixed media art over the past several years. When I was growing up I always drew, usually line drawings, and lines and intersecting compositions inform many of my pieces. I began drawing from the model when I was a teenager in Florida. I used to ride my ten speed bike miles and miles to go to a nighttime life drawing session in downtown St. Petersburg. When I escaped Florida I moved to New York in spring of 1978, and studied Life Drawing at the Art Students League of New York with in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I moved to Seattle after living in New York City for eight years.

 

Nighttime Foliage.

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Xavier:  Where can you be found online?

 

Russell C. Smith:  Most of my recent work can be viewed on my CreativeLifeInProgress Tumbler site: creativelifinprogress.tumblr.com, and prints of my collages can be viewed and purchased on Amazon Art through Treason Gallery, and on Saatchi Art. I have a Facebook Art page: Russell C. Smith Collage and Mixed Media Art. I’m on Twitter and Pinterest. I’m working on a website now. On Thursday, May 12th, I have an opening for a solo show at Dendroica Gallery on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

On Thursday, May 12th, I have an opening for a solo show at Dendroica Gallery on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

 

Welcome to the Retro Future.

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Xavier:  Going back to childhood, what is your earliest memory of making something artistic, and do you see a connection to hat you do now?

 

Russell C. Smith:  I remember drawing people and faces from my imagination at a very young age, and I have a memory of stacking my drawings up, as if I were getting ready for a show or something, and instead what I did was put them down on our living room carpet and walked on them. Art should be lived with, I think my young mind seemed to be telling me. And connecting what I do now with way back then, I remember cutting movies and movie stars out of the St. Petersburg Times newspaper with scissors, and this relates directly to gathering source material for making collages. Kind of funny how that this was also black and white source.

 

Russell C. Smith in the studio.

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Xavier:  What things do you keep coming back to in your work – what are your greatest obsessions?

Russell C. Smith:  People, women, portraits, nature, technology, society, sensuality – all the interactions and thoughts that people carry around inside themselves. A mixture of women, technology, nature, and how the past affects the now. For many years I worked on abstract collages, and when I began working with the figure again through collage, it was a slow build, and then all at once it came together. I saw how I could incorporate all of the previous experience of viewing figures in drawings and paintings and collage and photomontage into one form. It moved quickly from there, and the black and white series began, with offshoots into the Raintown Series, and now a break from it recently, with working on more and more color collages. Color pieces I did last summer led to recent abstract pieces, and now a blending of abstract and portraits.

 

Close-up of: Welcome to the Retro Future.

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Xavier:  There is a sense that you’ve positioned the female as a hero in this series – is that a correct reading about could you talk about this a bit?

 

Russell C. Smith:   Yes, I think that’s true to a large extent. Women as a subject matter and theme in art is as old as cave paintings. With the state of the world, and women only having and gaining more personal power, I think using nature and technology archetypes is in the air. By incorporating story, myth, nature, and commenting on the past and the present, the women in my work have taken on a life of their own. They are both modern, present-day women, and women in a retro-age living in a world out of time.

A breeze coming in the open window.

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Xavier:  What do you consider your greatest achievement as an artist?

 

Russell C. Smith:  Turning the corner a few years ago. Making work that people are enjoying. Connecting. Continuing to create art while I was writing fiction.

 

Close-up of: Fortified with strong coffee, a new hairdo, and PoohBear,

Lulu was ready to face the world.

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Xavier:  Who are your favorite artists?

 

Russell C. Smith:  Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Man Ray, Hannah Hoch, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Mitchell, to name just a few.

 

Queen Bee and Goldie Take a Trip.

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Xavier:  Tell us about the work in this show – what’s it about?

 

Russell C. Smith:  It’s called NEW GAMS FOR A GODDESS, and it’s mostly a show of my recent mixed media pieces, several new pieces in color on canvas and wood, and a series of mixed media work using black ink and pasted paper on canvas. I studied Chinese brush painting when I lived in New York, and using these types of brushes and form has become a useful way to layer on a background in black, white or colored ink before adding the collage elements to the pieces.

 

 The Geography of Her Mind #2 Mixed Media canvas.

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Xavier:  Tell me about these bigger pieces. How did you decide to work larger, and how did you come to work with wood especially?

 

Russell C. Smith:  I knew I had to work larger once I started getting shows in gallery spaces. This, coupled with the idea I’d been carrying around for many years, of working with vertical compositions – led directly to working on wood vertically. So, the nature series what first came out, which owes something to living in the Pacific Northwest since the late 1980s.

The newer pieces came out of the black and white series and the mixed media on canvas pieces. When I lived in New York I spent many hours looking at Japanese and Chinese artwork in galleries and museums, and the scroll seemed so elegant a way to present nature or a poem, and was completely contrary to the western painted rectangle. So, some of this viewing stuck in my head.

 

With nothing holding her back, not even the voices in her head,

Betty turned up the car radio and drove all day and all night.

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Xavier:  The word “nostalgia” is often used in a pejorative sense when talking about art, but in this body of work I believe nostalgia is a strength and an important aspect to the work. How did you make nostalgia work for you?

 

Russell C. Smith:  I prefer the word “retro” to nostalgic. Artists have always mined the past, and excavated gems for their own vision. This can be in the form of idea, and in the form of actual material that become elements of a piece. One of my pieces is called “Welcome to the Retro Future” and it comments on the feeling of the past in our daily lives, even as we hurtle headlong into the digital future. Fashion is constantly recycled, as are movies, and cultural beliefs. I’ve been a fan of film noir for years, and I like the idea of alternate universes and timelines. The mid-century modern images I often draw from are both sensual and modern, but of a modernity that’s passed. Looking back, there’s an innocence that world has, since we know how our own future has turned out. But of course, shaping and composing elements is how all of these gems turn into a new thing, and connect to a new vision.

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Kat, Kim, and Ms. Kitty walk into the woods. Mixed media on canvas. (2016)

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Xavier:  What projects do you have lined up for the future?

 

Russell C. Smith:  To continue working on the abstract portrait series I’ve recently begun, to get back to the black and white series since there’s many more directions to take with it. And to work larger on wood and canvas, as well as exploring the places where collage and sculpture intersect

 

 

Nature and Nurture, and In the Beginning,

Goddess invented the hairdo,

and the universe has never been the same.

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