Doug Russell

Artist Statement

I build improvised and invented realities born out of my love of direct observational drawing of architectural and natural structures. With fragments and marks continually piling up, expanding, collapsing, and disappearing – the imagery and process of my work expresses the perpetual cycle of hopeful construction and inevitable decay in the tradition of the architectural capriccio.  The genesis for this work began more than twenty-five years ago while living and teaching in Turkey, a dense and layered landscape of ancient ruin and modern renewal. The most recent series, “At Once and Ever”, combines content and imagery from all of my travels – in Turkey, Cambodia, Bali and Java in Indonesia, Peru, Japan, Hawaii, and Croatia. This latest series explores self-similarity across size and scale using repeated structural fragments and marks, the tension of  implied spatial depth and the objective flatness of the drawn surface, and the interpretation of forms through the act of drawing.  The “Upon all of their tomorrows…” series specifically reflects my time among the ruins of the Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Greek and Roman ruins of Turkey. The “The Persistence of Ruin” series uses layers of Mylar and Plexiglas to create an atmospheric and deep space. And through all of these series, in my studio grows an ever evolving architectural model, entitled Styropolis, constructed from discarded Styrofoam and cardboard. This architectural folly acts as inspiration and source material for other work – including stereoscopic photographs of Styropolis – often with other contemporary, historical, and art historical images projected onto the model.