WORKS Russ Warren 1971–2015
WORKS Russ Warren 1971–2015
Introduction
At The Edge: A Tribute to a Fellow-Traveler’s Passages Shaw Smith Professor of Art History, Davidson College Essay
Angels, Demons and Others: The Art of Russ Warren Carter Ratcliff Contributing Editor, Art in America Interview
William Dooley Director, Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, The University of Alabama
At The Edge: A Tribute to a Fellow-Traveler’s Passages Russ Warren: 1971–2015
Introduction
Shaw Smith Professor of Art History Davidson College
In Texas, football rules. It is a life or death matter. Standing in front of
Risk and reward are found in every stitch of the painting of these
his high-school teammates, a young, short, lean and wispy Russ Warren
passages. These airy, wispy doppelgangers of figures and shadows float
was given a simple choice by his coach: run laps for having smoked
like a Paso Fino rider on his mount while the thunderous impact on
a cigarette, or quit the club. Looking up at the bellowing behemoths
our consciousness rings out like the clicking hooves on the equine
surrounding him, he smiled nervously and quipped, “Got a light?” …
percussion boards; the magic mountains of the Shenandoah bounce us
ending his football career, but initiating a real focus on his art. An ending
from Mexico to Virginia and back, from jarring mythologies to a
and a beginning, a search for a new kind of light to “walk away from
staccato reality. In the cruelty and comedy of his spaces and faces,
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the crowd that beckons blind conformity” , as he poetically described
Russ confronts on canvas and paper the pristine classicism of royal
what it was for him to become an artist. Like the young boy looking for
Spanish corridors as well as the smelly vernacular of the livestock
a lantern in Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes, or the woman with a
markers from Western ranches. The spaces between these refracted and
lamp in Guernica, in that moment of truth in a Texas locker-room, Russ
reflected worlds reveal not simply an abundantly poignant present,
sought and found new lights in the works of Picasso, Goya, Velazquez,
but a frenetic tango with the past where bull, horse, toreador, and artist
Dubuffet, and Modigliani, among others.
all passionately converge like Zapater3 and Goya or Pablo and
The fulcrum of this story also reveals a recurrent dualism that almost literally runs through his work: that is, how darkness parallels light, reminding us that where there is loss and tragedy there is also renewal and humor. These twins of life and death in big and small ways make up the rhythm of his paintings so full of life in their disciplined, woven gestures and strokes and yet so dramatically and playfully dancing on the edge
Jacqueline. In these passages between such dualisms, that defining “moment of truth” emerges in his arena of creation and destruction. There at that edge, at that frontier, at that moment, the artist has found redemption and focus—evoking his refreshing and timely paraphrase of Frank Zappa, “just shut up and paint!”4 “No problem Coach, I got a light!”
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of apocalyptic calamity, famously known as his “madcap surrealism.”
1. Russ Warren, “An Artist as a Forever Agnostic Apologist”, Zapater, 2014, p. 13. 2. Donald Kuspit, Painting in the South: 1564–1980, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, 1983, p. 161.
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
3. Zapater was Francesco Goya’s childhood friend and lifelong confidante. 4. Frank Zappa was said to have told younger pontificating musicians to “Just shut up and play the guitar.”
Galilee, 2012 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, 60 x 36 inches each panel, 60 x 108 inches total Collection of Brian St. John Fox
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Angels, Demons, and Others The Art of Russ Warren
Essay
Carter Ratcliff Contributing Editor, Art in America
Some painters picture the world we all share. Russ Warren’s paintings show us a world of his own invention, a place of blazing light and crisp, inky shadows where extraordinary events and confrontation reshape the very structure of space. Returning from parts unknown, a giant dog is greeted by humans in postures either terrified or ecstatic or both at once (opposite). We can’t be sure, though the painting commemorating this return makes it clear that in Warren’s world animals are not lesser beings. People and dogs and horses are equals, a point made with vividly pictorial force by the pattern of parallel lines—rows of ribs—shared by man and dog in Temptation (p. 12), a painting from 1980. Their limbs, too, are similar enough to suggest that they share a good portion of their DNA. Warren’s art takes us to places where all living things are so intimately connected that everyone seems to be everyone else’s alter ego. Prominent among the artist’s dramatis personae is a figure standing in a distant doorway with the light behind him. Shadowy himself, he casts a shadow so long that it often reaches into the foreground—see La Infanta, 2013 (p. 30), and La Infanta II (p. 31), 2014. Warren transposes this personage as well as the Infanta herself from Las Meninas, 1656, by Diego Velásquez, though it would be just as plausible to say that these figures come from Pablo Picasso’s many reprises of this painting. Art historians have suggested that the man in the doorway is Don José Nieto Velásquez, the queen’s chamberlain and possibly a relative of the painter. According to this interpretation, his functions included opening and closing doors as the queen passed by. In fact, we don’t know for certain who this figure might be or why he is there, gazing at a scene at court or possibly out at us. He becomes still more mysterious whenever he appears, much transformed, in Warren’s paintings. With his slender limbs and cylindrical body, he
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could be the progenitor of all the artist’s other creatures—in other words, an emblem of Warren himself. At another speculative extreme, we could see this silhouetted figure as a reflection of the viewer poised to plunge into the swift and roiling currents of possibility that flow through Warren’s universe. For that is what he invites us to do: to immerse ourselves in a play of meanings alive with generative power. Each interpretation prompts another. So the face in No Exit (p. 6), 2002, is not only a Picassoid mask reimagined. It is also an allusion to the sugar skulls made in Mexico for the Dia de Muertos—Day of the Dead—as well as an image of a metal helmet merged with the head it is meant to protect. And the stark alternation of light and dark in the treatment of the eyes may be a suggestion of dice, hence of life’s hazards. Burial at Barrio San Antonio (p. 20), 1986, retells the tale of Francisco Goya’s exhumation and reburial, in the course of which it was discovered that his skull had somehow vanished. It reappears in this painting, multiplied, on platters held by angels and demons: light and dark embodiments of the good and the bad. This tableau is as complex morally as it is visually and it is up to us to [make sense] of it. We are on our own here, as we always are in the company of a fully realized work of art. Nonetheless, the artist may provide a clue with his images of Goya’s missing head. These are luminous even on the dark side of the picture, as if to suggest that the artist’s imagination survives and illuminates us even in darkness. Because Warren mixes the joyous energies of his vision with an equal portion of terror, he could be seen as the proponent of a grim belief: art survives and gives us ecstatic interludes and yet life’s overriding trajectory is downward to despair. As plausible as it may be when we focus on the
skulls and demons that populate certain paintings, this reading does not account for the exhilaration we feel as we enter Warren’s world, meet its inhabitants, and feel ourselves drawn into their stories—or, rather, join them in their dream-like grappling with life and death, damnation and redemption. For there is something redeeming, even something starkly joyful, about facing such ultimate things and trying, as best we can, to come to terms with them. Though terror persists, Warren’s art gives us occasion to tilt the odds in favor of joy. With sharp outlines and solid colors, Warren gives each of his figures a charge of compressed energy. Perhaps the flickering, shimmering textures we see in the backgrounds of Temptation and other paintings show that pictorial energy uncompressed. Hence a further dichotomy:
Return of the Giant Dog, 1979 Acrylic on canvas, 49 x 46 inches
Running Scared, 1, 1980 Acrylic on canvas, 49 x 46 inches
Collection of Jeffrey Moore
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
form constrained by figurative purposes in contrast to form set free to flow where it will. Yet these two kinds of form are not opposites, like light and dark or angels and demons. They are variations on one another and in Mare: A Work in Progress XXI (p. 23), 2000, we see them merging. For the mare in this painting is visible only when we have disentangled her outline from that of another animal—a dog, possibly, though it may be a wolf—and from other presences, including a visual echo of herself. From this layering of form Warren [generates] ambiguous textures that appeared only in the backgrounds of earlier works. Formal ambiguity is now upfront, giving his art a further degree of intensity. Magic Mountain (p. 27), 2009, is so exuberantly self-involved with its own play of line and color that it is possible, almost, to see as an abstract R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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No Exit, 2002 Oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
Two Artists, 1983 Etching on paper, 1/5 Image, 9.75 x7.75 inches; paper, 13.75 x 11 inches
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
painting. Nonetheless, we can’t help seeing pairs of small circles as eyes, and Magic Mountain is rife with them, along with marks frantically signifying noses, ears, mouths, and craniums. Moreover, there are birds and canines to be discovered in this immense, writhing heap of hieroglyphs. Warren has spoken of the frenzy that drives him as he covers a canvas with these intricate tangles of imagery. Sometimes, he says, his thoughts race so far ahead of his brush that he takes up another and
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
paints with both hands. He has not, however, abandoned his tightly circumscribed imagery. The shapes in Apple Picker (p. 24), 2003, for example, seem to have been stamped out from a solid slab of black. Haunted by history, driven to tell stories and invent myths, Warren is not what one would call a formalist. Still, every artist deploys forms and I would like to conclude these comments with an observation about a formal matter. Zaragoza (p. 34), a triptych from 2014, is twelve feet
wide. Drawn in, our peripheral vision is activated and we follow its seething colors, textures, and flickering lines in any number of directions at once. Stepping back, we see the unity of Zaragoza not so much established as commemorated by the skyline that reaches unbroken from left to right. Beneath this sinuous curve are the tangled outlines of heads and faces, some of them skeletal. There are graffiti-like scrawls and patterned dots of color that could be anything from pavements inlaid with pebbles to reptilian hides. This painting is a big, enveloping surge of imagery. Yet its unity is not seamless. The sky is black in the left-hand panel of Zaragoza (p. 35). In the middle panel it is the milky bluish white of dawn (opposite) and to the right it has deepened to the rich blue of a desert afternoon (p. 35). There are also shifts below the skyline, subtle changes in the prevailing atmosphere as we cross the border from one zone of churning imagery to the next. So the three panels of this triptych do and do not match up. Elsewhere we see demon-infested paintings that are and are not nightmarish, skulls that are and are not deathly, landscapes that are and are not serenely inviting. Reveling in ambivalence, Warren immerses us in the world’s complexities, conundrums, and unresolvable mysteries. Thus we could see him realist of sorts, not picturing appearances so much as conjuring up the elusive truths of our moral and emotional lives.
Detail of Zaragoza, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, middle panel, 60 x 48 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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A Conversation with Russ Warren
William Dooley
WD :
As you enter into your fifth decade of making paintings, you offer still the impression of having so much affection for painting. Can you take me through a typical day in the studio?
RW :
On a good day, I like to go look at what I did the day before while I’m still in a non-verbal mode. That gives me fresh insight into what I did and what I have to do. Then I feed the horses, do my chores and come back to it. I take a lunch break and then work till dinnertime. Usually I’m working on several things at a time and flip back and forth between them. When I have triptychs, I tend to work only on those— they’re so challenging and keep me active mentally and physically.
Director, Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, The University of Alabama
WD :
That sounds a lot like how you worked back when I knew you. So yours is a pretty consistent process.
RW :
Yes, and I have more energy now than I did back then and am producing more than ever. At my age, I have in the back of my mind that the clock is ticking, and there are so many things I want to do.
WD :
Russ, tell me about your early influences and experiences with art back in Texas. You grew up in Houston, right?
RW :
Okay. Here they are in a nutshell. My mother redecorated my room when I was very young, and she hung a Picasso poster by my bed. I didn’t know what the hell it was—a still life with a watermelon and a mandolin and a couple of clouds by the window. I looked at it first thing in the morning and last thing at night trying to figure out what was going on in it. Picasso remains my biggest influence, and I’ve been a life-long student of his. Also each time I went to visit my father’s office in a skyscraper in downtown Houston, at the top of the escalator looking at you majestically
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was a huge Rufino Tamayo mural of a screaming horse and a cubist still life, but made with cacti and southwestern elements. It was painted when Tamayo was most influenced by Picasso. So I got a double dose. I’m like a sponge: I’ve been influenced by so many artists. Earl Staley at the University of St. Thomas in Houston taught me painting, the relevance of art history and the importance of work. My painter’s code of “work ethic” began with Picasso and carried on through Earl. WD :
There is something kind of fascinating and horrifying about your Businessmen—the portrayal of the success icon with a patina of the demonic is also a common feature found among Picasso and his peers.
RW :
That came first from growing up in Houston around Texas businessmen that I never felt a kinship with. I wanted to leave that culture as fast as I could, and I did. In the late 60’s all the museums and galleries were showing color field, post-painterly abstraction. That all bored me. One day, I went into the Texas Gallery and they had a Roy de Forest show and I was elated. I also started looking at James Surls, Roger Brown and Jean Dubuffet. I used Dubuffet in my sort of adolescent reaction to Texas businessmen (pp. 14–15).
WD :
You worked at the Tamarind Institute while at the University of New Mexico. Tell me about your relationship to printmaking?
RW:
Yes, I studied printmaking with Garo Antriesian, one of the founders of Tamarind, focused on painting and printmaking for my MFA, and I got my teaching job at Davidson as a printmaker. But my main medium and love is painting. Nevertheless there are a lot of compositional tricks and visual problem solving techniques from printmaking that I use in painting. If I have a complicated painting going on and I want to introduce another image but can’t imagine where to put it, I’ll
stretch some acetate, paint on it, cut it out and move it around to discover surprising placement options. WD :
In pieces from the 1980’s and early 90’s, such as Burial at Barrio San Antonio (p. 20), Goodnight Little Cerberus (p. 21) and Fino, Fino Por Favor, 1991 (right), the way that you combine space and lyricism is really strong. It is as if you moved your subjects back in space so that their environment was more in play. Can you talk about this?
RW :
I always rebelled against the academic control over space. My mind is three-dimensional. I see flat, depth and immediacy as a metaphor. I always found studio responses to space a bore. Landscape has always been an important part of what I do. I’m drawn to mountainous landscapes. I spent a lot of time in Oaxaca Mexico and they have these burial mounds called Magotes. I frequently explored them in my sketchbooks. I was told they were sacred ground and was encouraged not to trespass. I did, however, and the immediate and violent approaching storms from the west scared the hell out of me! That’s where Magote Noche came from.
WD :
How old were you?
RW :
In my 30s. An amazing thing, when I moved to Charlottesville in 2008, I found the landscape out our back window to be like that of Oaxaca. This inspired me to incorporate the landscape into my work resulting in Magic Mountain (p. 27) and other paintings. And Zaragoza (named after Goya’s home town) (p. 34) came from our trip to Spain last summer. The contour of the landscape was similar to where we live here, but the colors were different, more ochre and brown…but magic nonetheless.
WD :
You were looking at Mexican Day of the Dead stuff?
RW :
Yes, I still do. My studio is full of folk art. I get ideas from it. I look at Mexican masks and practice drawing them. It’s been a career-long pursuit, trying to draw two or three faces all looking at you at one time, like Picasso did. Picasso’s discovery of the African mask was revolutionary. It described a totally new way of looking at reality. Non-illusionary. So too with Oaxacan folk art and Mexico.
Fino, Fino Por Favor, 1991 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72.5 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
WD :
Tell me about Fino, Fino Por Favor.
RW :
Fino means “fine gait.” When I was showing Paso Fino horses I remember approaching the Fino strip with my filly in the ring when the trainers were assembled for breakfast. They cheered me on shouting “Fino, Fino Por Favor,” and in my eye there were hundreds of them, when in actuality there were probably only about 15. My mother often said I had an overactive imagination! I decided to paint them, each one gesturing in a different way. I later wondered why.
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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physically and whip up the paint to give it some body. I worked in acrylic, then used oil for about 10 years, and am now back to acrylic. I successfully match the consistency of oil by whipping up my paint with a whisk like scrambled eggs.
I Remember Mexico, 1987 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, 72 x 30, 84 x 30, 72 x 30 inches North Carolina Museum of Art, Gift of Dot Hodges
WD :
Yes, there are lots of dudes in there. It’s a great painting.
WD:
It seems in a lot of your paintings from Mare: A Work in Progress XXI (page 23), Magic Mountain (page 27) and many of the later triptychs you are juggling and accumulating your artistic ingredients. How do you keep all of the painting elements in play? And if one is hurtling toward the fence, how might you go about salvaging it?
RW :
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I love paint. Using paint is reactionary. You make a mark and then another in reaction to the one before. I don’t worry about salvaging elements; I just add more layers. You can go faster if you work
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
WD :
De Kooning had a hard time finding anyone who could do that to his satisfaction.
RW :
De Kooning and Picasso had a lot in common, especially in their later work, with creating a fluidity with the oil that remains unique. I’ve always loved Picasso’s loose energetic works, the ones people put down and say he was getting old and senile, and yet what he can do with that wet paint is unbelievable. I love the way he’ll throw the paint around. That’s why I have gotten so excited about the livestock marker (pp. 32–33). A student whose husband raises cattle brought me some. They are oil crayons used literally to mark on livestock. They’re huge, 5 inches long and the size of a half dollar around. They are great for creating fluid texture and energetic color. They offer immediate gratification whereas the large paintings take weeks and months.
WD :
Recent paintings such as Galilee (p. 3), La Infanta I and II (pp. 30–31), Zaragoza (p. 34), and Night Fishing at Moms’ (p. 37) have been created as triptychs that span something like 12 feet across. What led to a decision to pursue the triptych? Was your interest in these informed by seeing other murals?
RW :
My infatuation with the triptych results in the understanding that three distinct panels must work alone and together. It’s a painter’s Rubik’s Cube. My first triptych, I Remember Mexico (left), was done in 1987. Recently, I’ve gone back to triptychs because they allow me to work large in a not so large studio. And I need that much space to not only make the experience acute, but enveloping for the viewer. As far as seeing other murals, maybe seeing again recently the chapel of San Antonio de la Florida right outside Madrid where Goya painted The Allegory of St. Anthony. You’ve probably seen it. It really drove Goya out of Spain. He’s buried there headless! The painting in the show Burial at Barrio San Antonio (p. 20) is about that.
WD:
I am curious if you want these murals to find their way to a public space. Their scale goes beyond the typical space a private collector might have.
RW :
Well actually, an enlightened collector did purchase Galilee (p. 3), plus two side panels that went along with it. And I do have a large mare painting from the Mare: A Work in Progress series (p. 23) in the dining room of Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville where I’m told it’s a real conversation piece. I love my paintings to have a life after they leave the studio.
WD :
Another piece that would be great in public would be Zaragoza.
RW :
I’d love for Zaragoza to go public. It would be neat if it could have an effect on people like Tamayo’s mural did on me.
WD :
Your collection of poems Zapater is really good. Your poetry exposes a bit of a life lived in foreign locales by a young man on a mission. Can you share some of your early experiences, living, in a sense, as the foreigner, the outsider?
RW :
I always felt like the protagonist in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman; he was born on the outside looking in. He calls it displacement. Ever since my years at UNM, I’ve written poetry. Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsburg and Sylvia Plath were early influences. I enjoy playing with words the same way I enjoy playing with images in my paintings. And it’s so convenient because you can carry it in your back pocket!
WD :
I wonder whether we could discuss some of the psychological aspects of your work.
RW :
Psychology, Neurology is what we are. It’s up to others to define it. Although the Surrealists bore me in terms of painting, I’ve always been very interested in their exercise of combining unlike objects to extract an element of the subconscious. A great example of this is at the heart of the film Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. I also like to put disparate images in paintings to evoke an unexpected psychological experience.
WD :
Can you think of a way to describe your interest and relationship with sanity and insanity? I ask about this because it permeates a lot of your work, maybe more of a psychology.
RW :
I’ve always dealt with the big, polar opposites—life and death, heaven and hell, good and evil, sanity and insanity. I deal with “a mind on the edge” in both my painting and my poetry. It’s not necessarily confessional. It’s closer to constructed lies as a means to discovering the truth.
WD :
I admire the fact that your paintings are inherently yours, by design, process and content. How do you do this when you look at so much work?
RW :
I do travel to look at art, but I’m very particular about what I study. Lately I’m excited by Matisse’s cut-outs, Picasso’s late work, Dubuffet’s early work, all of Anselm Kiefer and William Kentridge. Great art instructs and inspires me. I remember one teacher when I was a kid having us copy Van Gogh portraits. I was trying to be original so I rebelled and said: I want to be me. The teacher said “you can try as hard as you want to copy the Van Gogh and it will still be you.”
WD :
Your figurative painting forefathers create and maintain a vocabulary of the human figure that is an assertion, a sort of calligraphic statement. You have this in common with them. How has this come about for you and how is it that you have it so well mastered?
R w:
One my first “art experiences”—you know, one that makes you weak in the knees and chills on the arms—was when my mother took me to the Natural History museum in Michigan to see the Egyptian mummies, and I was blown away by the Egyptian way of painting figures and faces. I think the way I draw figures has something to do with that. Modigliani’s figures are similar. He started as a sculptor with Brancusi-like simplicity, but when he explored painting, he branched out. I’ve always admired his evolution.
WD :
Although you are not seeking complexity in painting, nothing I see of your work is easy or single-channeled. Some recurring images for example do not denote the same thing if making an appearance in different works, in different time periods. Can you talk about some of your subject image forms such as the figure in doorway, dog, young horse, skull, and so on?
RW :
The figure in the doorway is Nieto, of Velazquez’s Las Meninas. No one clearly understands his role, and I like that ambiguity. In my paintings R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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of the early 80’s like Running Scared (p. 5) and Temptation (below) the figure in the door represented my great friend Bill who died in a car wreck. My dog Zeke died around the same time, so Temptation refers not just to Velazquez and Brueghel paintings in the Prado but also to personal experience. Later, in my versions of Picasso’s and Velazquez’s Las Meninas—La Infanta I and II—he appears again, but he is more of a jokester or trickster, shedding light on the scene. Zeke also appears continuously in my art as Bill’s altar ego or my own. Skulls have sometimes had tragic connotations, other times they are humorous, poking fun at death as in Mexicans folk art. WD :
So, many of the subjects of your work stem from personal experience, from life and living. In most cases this is information a painting may not convey. What do your collectors want in regard to a personal narrative for your paintings?
RW :
I really don’t know what collectors want. I sold a symbolic portrait of Keith Richards (p. 29) to a client who refused to hear any explanation. Others often want an epic response. I don’t feel a need to be understood, and I enjoy it when viewers extrapolate their own meaning.
Temptation, 1980 Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 64 inches Collection of Howard Holtzman, Chicago IL
WD :
You have painted through an era that is not all that well disposed toward figurative painting. What is your take on this?
RW :
Painting has been out of fashion for quite awhile. This doesn’t bother me. I also still use a flip phone.
WD :
Russ, you experienced a lot of success early on with your work. I am referring to external accolades, your inclusion in exhibitions occurring on an international stage, that sort of success. How did you respond to that then and that now?
RW :
My experience with the Whitney Biennial was a negative one—too much glitz, posturing and showmanship. I loved Venice, all those sincere artists from around the globe letting their aesthetic hair down. Marcia Tucker, who curated the Biennale in 1984, had an amazing talent for bringing together artists with divergent views and styles.
WD :
Is it an issue for you to be a practicing artist living and working outside of the urban marketplace? To this point, could you even make the work that you make if you lived up in the middle of the city somewhere?
RW :
When I was showing in New York, Phyllis Kind said I needed to move there. But I knew better. As Lyle Lovett says, “If I was the man you wanted, I would not be the man that I am.” In many ways I find an affinity with Goya. He painted his whole life with insecure patronage—the court, the Pope, Napoleon—only to be left outcast in exile. He painted his best pictures near the end—deaf, confused and alone—only with haunting pictures of a war-torn mental collapse to comfort him. In a way I’m an enigma because I’ve never really believed in the viability of the art market because it changes so radically and has no predictability. Those that chase the art market usually end up on the bottom. I’ve always told my students if you want to be taken seriously and want to succeed, concentrate on painting the painting that cannot be denied, so that it surprises even you when you walk into your studio. Work, for me, offers a kind of nourishment. It’s a spiritual fulfillment—like confession and communion.
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Catalogue
Still Life with Hands, 1971 Oil and collage on board, 20.25 x 16.5 inches Collection of the Artist
Texas Businessman,, 1973 Acrylic, cigarette butts, and sand on wood, 5 x 4 inches Collection of the Artist
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Rodeo, 1975 Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 96.5 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Texas Pride, 1974–75 Acrylic on canvas, 57 x 66 inches Collection of the Artist
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Zeke in Florida, 1978 Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 72 inches Collection of Astri Holland, Davidson NC
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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The Magician, 1984 Acrylic on canvas, 55.5 x 72 inches Davidson College Art Collection, Gift of the Artist in honor of C. Shaw Smith, Sr., 1996
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Sea Shepherd, 1986 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 96 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Burial at Barrio San Antonio, 1986 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 90 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Goodnight Little Cerberus, 1987 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 80 inches New Orleans Museum of Art: Museum Purchase: NEA Matching Funds.
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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The Coffee Drinkers, 1997 Oil on board, 36 x 24 inches
Everyone Could Use a Little Miracle, 1998 Oil on board, 36 x 24 inches
Collection of Lyn Bolen Warren
Collection of Coran and Parke Capshaw
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Mare: A Work in Progress XXI, 2000 Oil on board, 48 x 84 inches Collection of the Artist
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Sisyphus, 2002 Oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
The Apple Picker, 2003 Oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
Collection of Lyn Bolen Warren
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
At Dr Tracey's, 2004 Oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
A Woman Earnest, 2005 Oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
Collection of Anne Chesnut
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Still Life with Cello, 2009 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches Collection of Cary Brown and Steven Epstein
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Magic Mountain, 2009 Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches Collection of Victoria and James Newman
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An Existential Cubist Relapse, 2010 Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Guitar Player Keith III, 2011 Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches Collection Brian St. John Fox
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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La Infanta I, 2013 Acrylic, rope and newspaper on canvas, triptych, 60 x 36 inches each panel, 60 x 108 inches total Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
La Infanta II, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 4 panels, 60 x 32 inches each, total 60 x 144 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Study in Byzantine, 10/7/14 Pencil, liquid acrylic, acrylic, livestock marker and scraper on paper, 24 x 18 inches
Ode to Tamayo, 9/3/14 Pencil, liquid acrylic, acrylic, livestock marker, oil stick and scraper on paper, 24 x 18 inches
Collection of Ed Montecalvo
Collection of Lotta LĂśfgren and Andy Hord
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
I'm not Psycho, 9/30/14 Pencil, liquid acrylic, acrylic, livestock marker, oil stick, glass bead gel and collage on paper, 24 x 18 inches
Chicken, 10/4/14 Pencil, liquid acrylic, acrylic, livestock marker and oil stick on paper, 24 x 18 inches Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
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Zaragoza, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, 60 x 48 inches each panel, 60 x 144 inches total Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Detail of Zaragoza, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, left panel, 60 x 48 inches
Detail of Zaragoza, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, right panel, 60 x 48 inches
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
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Russ Warren Born 1951
Education 1973 B.F.A. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM 1977 M.F.A. University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio TX
Teaching 1978–08
Professor of Art, Davidson College, Davidson NC
Selected Solo Exhibitions 1972 Old Town Studio, Albuquerque NM 1975 University of St. Thomas Art Gallery, Houston TX 1976 1975 Artists Biennial Winners Exhibition, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans LA 1977
San Antonio Museum of Modern Art and University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio TX
1979–08 1979 1980 1981–88 1982–84 1984 1984–85
Yearly Faculty Exhibitions, Davidson College Art Gallery, Davidson NC Spirit Square Art Gallery, Charlotte NC University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte NC Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York NY Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago IL Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte NC Russ Warren Emblems of the Unseeable, Knight Gallery, Charlotte NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC (catalogue with essay by Carter Ratcliff) 1985 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC
1985 1986–11 1995–15 2014 2015
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Drew University Art Gallery, Madison NJ Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte NC Les Yeux du Monde, Charlottesville VA Russ Warren: La Infanta, Darden Business School, Charlottesville VA Russ Warren: Medium as Metaphor, Explorations with Livestock Markers, John P. and Stephanie F. Connaughton Gallery, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA
Selected Group Exhibitions 1975 1975 Artists Biennial, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans LA (catalogue essay by Jane Livingston) 1975 Southeast Texas Collective, Beaumont Art Museum, Beaumont TX (catalogue) 1976 Artists Invitational, Beaumont Art Museum, Beaumont TX (catalogue) 1977 Bosch Bash, University of St. Thomas, Houston TX 1976 Artists Invitational, Beaumont Art Museum, Beaumont TX 1976–77 Houston Area Exhibition, Blaffer Gallery, Houston TX 1979 Biennial Exhibition, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte NC 1979 Boston Printmakers 31st Annual Exhibition, Boston MA 1980 New Orleans Triennial, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans LA (Curator Marcia Tucker, catalogue) 1980 Tragicomedy, Mystery, and Humor, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC (catalogue) 1980 48th Southeastern Competition, SEECA, Winston-Salem NC 1981 Currents: A New Mannerism, Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville FL (catalogue) 1981 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of Art, New York NY (catalogue) 1981 Contemporary Drawing, University of California at Santa Barbara (catalogue) 1982 BEAST: Animal Imagery in Contemporary Art, PS1, Long Island NY (catalogue) 1982 Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis IN 1982 Figures, Forms, and Expressions, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo NY (catalogue) 1982 Agitated Figures: The New Emotionalism, Albright-Knox Gallery of Art; Hallways Gallery, Buffalo NY; and Hal Bromm Gallery, New York NY (catalogue)
Night Fishing at Moms’, 2015 Acrylic on canvas, triptych, 60 x 48 inches each panel, 60 x 144 inches total Courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
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R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
1983
Southern Fictions, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston TX (catalogue with essay by William Fagaly) 1983 Southern Fervor: Religious Iconography in Contemporary Southern Painting, Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA 1983–84 Painting in the South 1564–1980, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond VA; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham AL; National Academy of Design, New York NY (catalogue with essays by Donald Kuspit and others) 1984 Venice Biennale, US Information Agency and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Venice, Italy Curator Marcia Tucker (catalogue) 1984 USA: Portrait of the South, Palazzo Venezia, Rome, Italy 1984 SECCA Seven, Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem NC 1984–85 Russ Warren: Emblems of the Unseeable, Knight Gallery, Charlotte NC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC (catalogue with essay by Carter Ratcliff) 1985 New Figurative Painting, Asheville Art Museum, Asheville NC 1986
Southern Contemporary Artists Invitational, Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville FL; Anniston Museum of Natural History, Anniston AL
1986
Black and White: A Drawing Exhibition, Gallery 29I, Atlanta GA; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens GA; and Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN
1987
Drawing Redefined, Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro NC
1987
North Carolina Artists Exhibition, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC (catalogue with essay by Roberta Smith, Guest Curator)
1987 Luminous Impressions: Prints from Glass Plates, Museum of Art, Charlotte NC (catalogue with essay by Jane Kessler) 1986
opposite Russ Warren exhibition While We Sleep, October 2011, Les Yeux du Monde Gallery, Charlottesville, VA
5th Annual Exhibition of North Carolina Sculpture, Research Triangle Park NC (catalogue) 1988–90 41st Corcoran Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens GA; New Orleans Museum of Art; Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach FL (catalogue with essay by William Fagaly) 1989 Made in America, Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, Virginia Beach VA (catalogue) 1989
North Carolina Artists Invitational, Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory NC
1989
Looking South: A Different Dixie, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham AL
1990 Images of Faith, Kentucky Museum, Northport AL 1991 Graphic Figures – Figurative Graphics, 7 American Artists in Cologne, Cologne, Germany 1991 Art and Social Vision, Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro NC (catalogue) 2000 North Carolina 20th-Century Masters, Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh NC 2005 Equus Il, curated by Sarah Sargent, The Arts Center, Orange VA (catalogue) 2007 A Decade of Collecting, University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville VA 2013 Russ Warren: A Little Night Music, Beverly Street Studio, Staunton VA 2014 Russ Warren: La Infanta, Darden Business School, Charlottesville VA 2015 Russ Warren: Medium as Metaphor, Explorations with Livestock Markers, Mcintire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA
Selected Publications Elizabeth Hess, “Russ Warren, Xray Visions,” The Village Voice, June 3–9, 1981, 104. Ellen Schwartz, “The Whitney and Guggenheim,” Art News, April 1981. Roberta Smith, “Biennial Blues,” Art in America, April 1981, 95–99. Carrie Ricky, “Curatorial Conceptions, Artforum, April 1981, 52–57. Grace Glueck, “How Emerging Artists Emerge,” Art News, May 1981, 95-99. Jesse Murray, “Russ Warren,” Arts Magazine, May 1981, 22. Richard Flood, “Russ Warren,” Artforum, September 1981, 79–80 Roberta Smith, “Agitated Figures, The New Emotionalism,” The Village Voice, June 22. 1982 Marcia Tucker, “An Iconography of Recent Figurative Painting,” Artforum, Summer, 1982, 70–75. Merle Schipper, “Changing Visions,” Images & Issues, Summer 1982. Donald Kuspit, “The New Emotionalism”, Artforum, October 1982, 74. Susan A. Harris, “Russ Warren,” Arts Magazine, January 1983, 28. Ronny Cohen, “Russ Warren,” Art News, February 1983, 158. Nicolas A. Moufarrege, “Intoxication,” Arts Magazine, April 1983. Robert Storr, “Southeast Seven”, Arts Journal, May 1984, 74.
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Jane Kessler, “Russ Warren,” Atlanta Art Papers, November/ December 1984. Jane Grau, “Russ Warren’s Emblems of the Unseeable,” Arts Journal, November 1984. Barry Schwabsky, “Russ Warren’s Magic Theatre,” Arts Magazine, April 1985. Vivien Raynor, “Russ Warren,” New York Times, December 28, 1985. Robert Godfrey, “Drawing Redefined,” Arts Journal, November 1987. “The 41st Biennial,” The Washington Post, April 5, 1989. Mark Kingsley, “Corcoran Biennial Celebrates the Decentralized South,” Arts Journal, June 1989. Richard Schiff, “Russ Warren, ”Crafting Concentration: Three Artists at Davidson,” 1993, 14–17. Scott Lucas, “Night Mares,” Creative Loafing, June 26, 1999. “Mare in the Mirror,” C-ville Weekly, November 9–15, 1999. Ruth Latter, “Inspired by Picasso’s Captivating Ugliness”, The Daily Progress, October 2005. Catherine Malone, “He’s a Magic Man,” C-ville Weekly, 2009. “Checking in with Russ Warren,” C-ville Weekly, June 29, 2010. Brendan Fitzgerald, “Magic Touch, Inside the Funny Scary World of Russ Warren,” cover story, C-ville Weekly, August 9–15, 2011. Cindy Marks, “Artist Profile: Russ Warren,” The Artizen Traveler, Fall 2012, 11–19. Josh McCullar, “Russ Warren’s Music and Magic,” VaMODERN, Feb.18, 2013. Russ Warren, Zapapter. Les Yeux du Monde, 2014
Selected Collections Capital One Bank, Richmond VA Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston SC Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis IN Martha Jefferson Hospital, Charlottesville VA Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte NC New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans LA North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, University Park PA Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton NJ The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Russ Warren in his studio, Charlottesville VA, 2015
VA
Gallery Affiliations Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago and New York Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte NC Les Yeux du Monde, Charlottesville VA 40
R U S S W A R R E N | Works, 1971–2015
Catalogue published in conjunction with traveling exhibition,
Russ Warren: Works 1971–2015 24 March – 3 May 2015
Baker Gallery Walker Arts Center Woodberry Forest School Woodberry VA 29 October – 3 December 2015
Sarah Moody Gallery of Art The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa AL
Publication ©2015 Les Yeux du Monde Gallery Introduction, Essay, and Interview ©2015 the authors All artwork ©2015 Russ Warren ISBN 978-0-9890107-4-0 Colophon Design Anne Chesnut Copy editing Sarah Sargent Martha Banks Allison Wong Photography Bill Moretz, all except Monica Galloway, p. 17; David Ramsey, p. 18 Type Garamond No. 3 & Whitney
WORKS Russ Warren 1971–2015