Russell C. Smith / Collage and Mixed Media Artist / Artist Statement

Contact me at russellcollageart@gmail.com for questions about licensing and commissions.

A few years ago, I turned a corner in my collage art. After having created abstract collages for many years, a figurative shift happened. The shift came in the form of a black and white series of figures and portraits, sometimes including words. When a big creative shift happens, it feels like an express train, a wild windstorm, the onrush of a massive tidal wave. A new mode of envisioning the world takes you to a new someplace you've been heading toward all along. You blink once, and you find yourself there. In a place where you see the world differently.

I stayed with the black and white express train to somewhere, using pasted paper on watercolor paper until the black and white (and shades of gray) train ran to the end of the line or hopped off the tracks. I wasn't thinking about how or when color would come back into the picture, but it was inevitable, just as it was quite likely that black and white visions would return, and now, black and white and gray and shades of brown. Shifts have to occur naturally, in the same way that making art is about following one's instincts.

The next big change that happened by making the black and white series was working directly to working larger, since showing the bigger visions that come with having a turning point involve showing in galleries. When you put a different part of you into your work, you get to step outside yourself and then step back inside yourself. Somehow, these steps lead directly to working larger on whatever form fits your vision. In my case, it meant no longer working just on paper, watercolor paper, and small canvas pieces, it mean also working on wood and larger canvases. The visions expanded to fit the forms, and led to the next stage, new phase, and the beginning of the next beginning. Turning corners turns out to be connected to following your deep and true instincts where they will lead, and discovering as you go along what the new thing you are saying will be.

Combining expansive ideas that live within us all, my collage and mixed media art is made to linger in the viewer’s mind. Using the medium of pasted paper and ink, I'm interested in touching on the underlying feelings and findings we carry inside us. Making Collage and mixed media pieces is about responding to the constantly changing world we find ourselves in, the times we live in, and the new century we find ourselves in. Looking through multiple lenses, collage references the past and pulls back a curtain on the present in a way that pauses and then fast-forwards our modern lives. For a time, we can step into an alternate version of the world and find our place inside it. In a series of quick jump cuts and intuitively connected images, collage is how the world sees itself, the transformative digital world, the world of creative innovation and ideas of now and new, the world of a retro past we keep borrowing and re-purposing from, and the world of the imagined future that's literally just around the corner..

My collage and mixed media pieces are informed by years of life drawing, connecting to art, books, and movies at a young age, years of viewing every type of visual art, writing, reading, and engaging in the cultural now. I studied life drawing at the Art Students League of New York from 1978-1980, and took classes in Chinese brush painting in New York City.

Contact me at russellcollageart@gmail.com for questions about licensing and commissions.