Russell Stephenson
Mindscapes J.R. Mooney Galleries, Boerne, TX June 13-July 1 2015
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Please direct all inquiries and questions regarding artwork to: Gabriel Diego Delgado, Gallery Director J.R. Mooney Galleries, Boerne gdelgado@jrmooneygalleries.com Phone: 830-816-5106
Russell Stephenson
Mindscapes
Russell Stephenson was born in Abilene, Texas in 1973. He has lived most of his life in West and Southwest Texas, and has been inherently influenced by the rugged landscape and shallow color palette Texas offers. Vacations and road trips led him to the high deserts and Rocky Mountains of New Mexico and Colorado which influenced his capacity for grand themes and monumental subject matter. Soon after public schools, he received a full tuition scholarship to the Art Institute of Seattle in Washington where he studied visual communications. He left school to pursue his own interests in painting and drawing only to return to school at The Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. There he concentrated his studies on sculpture and graduated with his BFA in 2001. After his undergraduate studies he returned to Texas and attended graduate school at The University of Texas in San Antonio. Russell graduated in 2006 with an MFA in Printmaking. Russell has been an active participant in the San Antonio art scene ever since, showing and teaching in the community.
“Mindscapes,” a solo exhibition of new work by San Antonio artist, Russell Stephenson, is a curated spotlight of art that engulfs the viewer into a metaphysical journey through sci-fi-esque renditions of Texas topography, juxtaposed and coupled with the artist’s own exploration of mind and world, shaped by personal afflictions. From violent thunderclouds masquerading as crowns for celestial auroras of heavenly atmospheric amalgamations (halos) in “Corona”, to canyons and mountains portrayed as conceptual struggles in identity (an artist’s simplified battle of good vs. evil), in “The Majestic”, we feel an undercurrent of cosmic exploration with a signature medium by way of a quest for self-discovery. Current events like the recent flooding in South Texas, the massive supercells over the Texas Panhandle and the artist’s own drive to experiment all play a role in Stephenson’s influences for “Mindscapes”. Examples of emotion abutted by landscape explorations can be found in the calmness of mind of “Silent Solitude,” but contrasted in “Castleaine” with its compositional angles; assumptive tectonic plates that jut upward, forced from the subterranean by violent bursts of the grinding fault lines. With the inclusion of two artworks from the “Cave Painting” series, “Cave Painting III & V”, the audience delves into the past with visual investigations of the primordial gestures of primitive man: a rock art aesthetic that references the cave paintings of Lascaux, Texas’s own Pecos region and Palo Duro Canyon. Stephenson strives to capture the intuitive application of creative need in his own color palette aesthetic while retaining his mastered craft for his push and pull of textures – i.e. the divots, cracks, creases, and pockets of layered grooves that capture our wild imaginations. The scraped and gouged paint give rise to his pursuit of reconnection to art history by way of contemporary applications.
In 2013/2014, J.R. Mooney Galleries had previously shown only Stephenson’s Texas Panoramic series, a kind of middle ground aesthetic that melded with the gallery’s fundamental branding that has always included traditional impressionistic aesthetic mixed with portrait, landscapes and Tuscan paintings. Stephenson’s abstracted Texas landscapes gives us horizon lines that grounded us in traditional landscapes of geographical locations we could digest; a kind of concrete middle ground that fit in between the abstract and traditional genres. The new artwork for “Mindscapes” was much more than that topographically driven formulation. In over a year, I saw a maturity in style, a mastery of technique and a willingness to explore tools that included sticks, rocks, spatulas and palette knives, and which brought about a new sense of control, of student vs. teacher, and Stephenson playing the subordinate to the art. He learned along the way, and in the course of being schooled by his creations, he found philosophical substance. Conjectural aspects of personal inner struggle, an inward reflection of self that transcribes physical boundaries to be projected out and manifested as conceptual regurgitations, as he bears down and expels proof of everything around him that affects his mindset - whether political, social or environmental.
--Gabriel Diego Delgado, Gallery Director, J.R. Mooney Gallery, Boerne, TX
Russell Stephenson Mindscapes
J.R. Mooney Galleries, Boerne, TX June 13-July 1, 2015
Cave Painting V oil, 12” x 16”.................................$530.00 Corona oil 24” x 36”.............................................$2,400.00 Cave Painting III oil 18” x 24”............................ $1,200.00 Castlelaine oil 24” x 36”.......................................$2,400.00 The Majestic oil 30” x 30”.....................................$2,500.00 Surge oil 18” x 30”................................................ $1,500.00 Silent Solitude oil 30” x 30”.................................. $2,500.00
“It’s always for me a translation of the experiences and the places that I’ve been and then this kind of internal interpretation of those places. These are all collective experiences over time of different places that I’ve been to. In the artistic mind it turns into a totally different language altogether, because there’s also the exploration into color, an exploration into technique, an exploration into how to push the boundaries in the work...rather than just capture what the eye can see. But also try to develop something new out of it and explore a new depth in some of the works…and create a sense of realism in the abstraction so the abstraction itself becomes its own reality.”
“I’m one of the stereotypical artists that was born with a pencil in my hand and I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pencil and scribbling on the walls with crayons. My artistic journey started from then and has become this long paced development of an unique voice that has developed over time through professional academics and my own experimentation.”
Cave Painting V
oil 12” x 16” $530.00
“The idea of the supercell that kind of carries an idea and then dumps it at will wherever it may; I think they’re quite spectacular, sometimes they bring life and sometimes they bring death. They fill lakes that are ravaged by drought, but at the same time they overflow rivers and cause devastation. So, the power of nature has shown up in this recent body of work, because we have seen so much of it lately.”
Corona
oil 24” x 36” $2,400.00
“So periodically, my work changes and evolves depending on how I’m growing in that particular period and what occurrences happen in the news on a daily basis, and what events occur in my own life in times and the people that I know and it all kind of gets thrown into a blender, so to speak, and mixed in together and it all comes out in one form or another in the studio when I work.”
Cave Painting III
oil 18” x 24” $1,200.00
“its kind of that split of looking at what pokes its head up from the landscape and then also what dives into it. [Castlelaine is] also influenced by the recent explosion of the volcano that we had in Chile and some of the photographs and animations that I saw from that eruption, it certainly was Nature rearing its horrific head and exploding things into the atomsphere, where the Earth just opens up and decides to speak.”
Castlelaine
oil 24” x 36” $2,4000.00
“What started as landscapes ended up as an internal thing in the mind.”
The Majestic
oil 30” x 30” $2,500.00
“I’m certainly influenced by the natural world, I mean as we all are, we are all affected by it. From the immensity of the sky and what’s unknown underneath the waters and so on, we become very small in comparison to the forces of nature.”
Surge
oil 18” x 30” $1,500.00
“...a quiet place, a place of rest, some kind of meditative space, is not always a place that one can walk into a room and simply experience...what i try to do with the work is create that space, so that when my eyes fall upon it, or while I’m working with it I can go to that space. and then once the piece is made, metaphorically that place always exists.”
Silent Solitude
oil 30” x 30” $2,500.00
An Interview with Artist Russell Stephenson This June, J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art is hosting San Antonio artist and contemporary abstract painter, Russell Stephenson, and his new body of work, entitled “Mindscapes.” Russell Stephenson took some time on the eve of his show’s opening to discuss his art and his current modes of thought and influences that are currently driving his work. A native Texan, Stephenson has been based out of San Antonio for the past 11 years, but has ventured throughout the United States observing and gathering inspiration for his art. Stephenson elaborates, “Throughout my extensive travels and explorations...I’ll always try to bring some of the inspiration that I always got from nature into the work in one form or another.” As an artist, Russell Stephenson has been on a lifelong journey that started early in his life, “I’m one of the stereotypical artists that was born with a pencil in my hand and I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pencil and scribbling on the walls with crayons. My artistic journey started from then and has become this long paced development of an unique voice that has developed over time through professional academics and my own experimentation.” Everyday life and its challenges and joys merge into his abstractions; they are processed through his hand as he creates. “So periodically, my work changes and evolves, depending on how I’m growing in that particular period and what occurrences happen in the news on a daily basis. And what events occur in my own life and times and the people that I know and it all kind of gets thrown into a blender, so to speak, and mixed in together and it all comes out in one form or another in the studio when I work.”
When Stephenson works, the execution is integrated with an intuitive ingenuity, resulting in a brilliance of force for maximum visual impact within his painterly process. The artist picks up anything that can be improvised into a tool to translate the feeling and effect he is striving to achieve. Stephenson elaborates, “I’m always experimenting with different techniques and different tools in order to explore the mark-making aspect of my work. Sometimes that involves a pencil, sometimes a brush, sometimes a spatula, sometimes something out of the kitchen drawer...” Currently, Stephenson has created a painting series that references the landscape, yet in a more conceptual and introspective nature than his previous bodies of work. Having grown up in the Texas Panhandle, the expansive landscape permeates his subconscious, manifesting in exploratory renderings in paint. One of the signature paintings in the exhibition, “Corona”, depicts textural cloud formations hovering with tension over an earthen toned horizon. Stephenson explains in depth, “‘Corona’ is influenced by that landscape and even more recently by the thunderstorms that have ravaged Texas... the idea of the supercell that kind of carries an idea and then dumps it at will wherever it may; I think they’re quite spectacular, sometimes they bring life and sometimes they bring death. They fill lakes that are ravaged by drought, but at the same time they overflow rivers and cause devastation. So the power of nature has shown up in this recent body of work, because we’ve seen so much of it lately.” Having done realistic figurative work in the past, Stephenson’s process has evolved to transcend the figure to wholly depict the world the figure inhabits and is experiencing. What started as landscapes ended up as an internal thing in the mind. “Once I got all the way through school, the figure started to come out of the work, and then I just concentrated on the world itself and thereby
the viewer of the paintings became the figure and the work that hung on the wall became the world I was able to explore.” This transition of subject matter in relation to the landscape has been a gestalt of psychological elements that have come together in his artistic formation. The role nature plays in his work and how it enforces a sense of scale both literally and metaphorically, causes Stephenson to reflect, “I’m certainly influenced by the natural world, I mean as we all are; we are all affected by it. From the immensity of the sky and what’s unknown underneath the waters and so on, we become very small in comparison to the forces of nature.” Ultimately, an abstraction of the landscape is merely the result of Stephenson having formulated a process to express all the intangibles of the many multifaceted aspects of witnessing various locales firsthand. “These are all collective experiences over time of different places that I’ve been to. In the artistic mind it turns into a totally different language altogether, because there’s also the exploration…into how to push the boundaries in the work, rather than just capture what the eye can see. But also try to develop something new out of it and explore a new depth in some of the works…and create a sense of realism in the abstraction so the abstraction itself becomes its own reality.” © Katherine Shevchenko, Art Consultant
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