STATEMENTS
NETWORKS (2024)
“Cedars or spiders are always busy doing things for themselves, in their own interest.” - Carl Safina
The climate crisis and the damaging effects of human activity on the natural world - our planet - are at the root of my recent body of work. The ideas grew out of two very different trips, one to Acadia National Park in 2018 and the other to view Renaissance paintings in Italy in 2019. While a non-believer, I have always felt the power and beauty of art inspired by religion of all kinds. These works can represent some of our highest aspirations for finding meaning. At the same time, the natural beauty of Acadia was still fresh in my mind. In the Renaissance works in Italy, most of what was depicted as divine was of human form. Trying to address how our human needs are increasingly in conflict with the natural world, I wanted to flip this equation, and put nature in a divine space, giving it more weight. Why is lichen less holy than St. Peter??
Since starting this work, the increased environmental degradation from political divisions, capitalism, population displacement, and war has been deeply discouraging. The need to recognize the interconnection of all life is more critical than ever. There are lessons to be learned from many non-Western cultures and religions. Science is teaching us that the natural world is more interrelated than we’ve previously understood. For example, the ways fungal networks affect the life of plants and trees and have a unique role in regeneration. Technology is changing life on Earth in ways impossible to grasp. The outcome is unknown, but it’s clear, all the players are fighting for survival. These paintings are a reflection on this drama.
- Vivien Russe, 2024
NETWORKS (2024) - QUOTE CONTEXT
An excerpt from Carl Safina’s book Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe
“Machines do not create conditions suitable for their functioning, do not create themselves, make their own parts, do not self-propagate, do not form communities, do not self-evolve or self-diversify. A more basic difference distinguishes the living. Living things have purpose: to stay alive, to create more life, to adapt to a world that likewise adapts to their presence in the world. Cedars or spiders are always busy doing things for themselves, in their own interest. No machine has purpose or self-interest. A machine has merely a use. Only aliveness creates conditions for meaning.”
(2022)
In recent years I’ve been able to participate in USM travel trips, going overseas to France and Italy, as well as to locations here in Maine - including Schoodic Pennisula in Acadia National Park, and Monson. The Renaissance paintings I saw in Italy were especially inspirational.
When a friend asked about my recent painting, I explained, “I was interested in how gold leaf was used in religious paintings to elevate the subject and to suggest holiness or sacredness. It seems to me, especially with impending climate change, our natural world needs to be given that sanctity in everyone’s mind and I chose some of the simpler, older plant forms to include in this thought - mosses, lichens and ferns. I’m influenced by the work of the late E.O. Wilson who has advocated so strongly for species protection.”
In this work, the Italian Renaissance meets the Maine Woods.
RINSED EXHIBITION (2003)
The longer I've been a painter, the more hesitant I am to make a statement about the work. I rely on my intuition and a creative process that is not conscious when I make each painting, it's only after I've completed a body of work that it makes sense to try to define what's been done.
I'm interested in placing ordinary or mundane events, whether natural or human, in a larger context. By creating these juxtapositions (duets?) I am able to realize my belief in the basic interconnectedness of life. My fascination with this theme has been present throughout my twenty-five year long painting career.
Because these times we are in are so deeply troubling, the main subject of these paintings is the search for wholeness or goodness. If the paintings of my 2003 show at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery were about renunciation, then this group may be about redemption or reclamation.
COVERS SERIES (1996)
The title of my 1996 solo show at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland was ‘Covers’. This word, which is used regularly in the names of many of my pieces, is key to understanding the structure and meaning of this body of work, which I started six years ago. Only recently, I happened to look at the enclosed dictionary definition of the term and was struck by the number of ways my choice of imagery correlates with the multiple definitions of this word, whether used as a noun or a verb.
I recognized when I chose this word, that its meaning, both in terms of its breadth as well as its specific definitions could serve me well as a metaphor to carry my artistic vision. We are living in a time of accelerated change. The technological revolution, bioengineering, market economics and globalization are leading us on a path that seems both promising and dangerous. At times, this can be confusing, calling into question the difference between appearance and reality. These changes, for all their potential benefits, are also accompanied by strong feelings of anxiety, a sense of loss, and a longing for some kind of security or anchor.
The concept of a cover has a visual parallel in the structure of my work. My pieces are layered, often using a lot of transparency, and the surfaces themselves are sometimes manipulated, either literally or with the use of illusion. They usually show an interaction of geometric shapes and organic imagery; this acts as a visual analogue to the duality of constancy versus change.
A quilt is a bed cover, and I draw heavily on the American quilt in my imagery. I appropriate traditional patterns and use them in my layering, and I work off of the names of the patterns in the meaning of individual pieces. I have found that the use of quilt imagery places my work in a time context, suggesting that nothing is isolated or static, rather it is part of an ever-changing and shifting landscape.
In my work, there are recurring references to things that are mutable and unstable: fabric, water, and money. These images are simultaneously meant to suggest their opposite: those things that are stable, lasting, secure, and enduring. Are these the characteristics of a rock, or stars, a family, a marriage, a job, a hope, the land, a nation, art, or even painting itself? The intention of this work is to raise and examine that question.