Russell Frampton was
born in Warsash on the Hampshire coast in 1961, he studied art and more
specifically painting at Portsmouth College of Art, Exeter college of Art and
Design and Plymouth University where he gained an MA in Fine Art in 2002. He
currently is based in Devon where he lectures in Painting, Drawing and Printmaking
at Plymouth college of Art and Screendance and experimental digital dance
practice at Plymouth University. Russell has work in many national and
international collections including the University of Cambridge, Plymouth
University, Exeter University and Lloyds bank.
Russell’s work stems
from deep connections with the experience of landscape, specifically the
moorlands and coasts of the West Country and the coastal fringes of West
Brittany where he had a studio for many years. Recent trips to Australia and
New Zealand and the Basque country of Northern Spain have provided rich new
seams to explore and elements of these landscapes appear in some of the work
exhibited at The View Gallery.
Russell’s paintings engage in a process of inscribing and re-inscribing
the often disparate elements that constitute a place. Multiple layers describe
an accreted surface of almost geological depth, building overlain details and
colour and form juxtapose, aiming for the point of balance, both within the
formal concerns of the painting and the artists connection with the physical
landscape, acting perhaps as a form of mediator or facilitator. Mixed media and
collage elements play a role in enhancing literary, historical and mythological
elements and Russell’s distinctive autographic mark making and colour palette create
the framework within which the paintings can manifest themselves. This very
painterly framework is informed by intuition, theoretical and practical
concerns and underpinned by a proximal connection to materials and their
application.
The connections
between different areas of Russell’s wider practice, [film making, music
production and digital image making] are apparent in many of the processes
inherent in the construction of the work. The editing and re shaping of forms,
the description of temporality and a sense of rhythm and movement that
permeates many paintings, all contribute to an interdisciplinary ethos of
production. Painterly understandings are being continually formed and reformed
and this allows work to be supple and flexible, resisting constraint and
maintaining an informed state of fluidity.
Some of the paintings locate ideas of
ritualised space and archaeological stratification/artifact as central
concepts. The resulting paintings can be seen as two dimensional depictions of
a three dimensional space, within which objects, markers or reference points are
positioned to evoke a sense of the distillation of a liminal architecture.
Indeed the creation of a liminal space, often a component of both painting and
film, seems the most effective way of allowing paintings to exist on the edge,
between states of abstraction and representation, in a form of dynamic flux.
Whilst many of the paintings are direct
responses to places and experiences within landscapes, the formal structure of
the work can be seen in some respects as being abstract, in the sense that the
work is not representing degrees of ‘realistic’ representation. This is because
the concerns are as much with the making of an object and the building of a
painting that refers as much to painting itself as to content, as Roger Hilton
notes:
“Abstract
art is the result of an attempt to make pictures more real, an attempt to come
nearer to the essence of painting.”
In many ways it is the continual search for
this illusive essence that drives the painter to undertake a lifetime of
research and practice. We can often recognise it, sometimes replicate it, and
occasionally capture it to make the paintings ‘more real’ but this essence is
never fixed. The paintings in this
exhibition are the documents of this very search.
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