Julia Russell

Most of my paintings begin with an emotional attachment to the place I am painting. They could be places I return to time and time again—certain meadows, paths, and coves on Martha’s Vineyard or one-time adventures out West or as far away as Kenya. I work from photographs that I have taken, photographs that capture light and shadow in interesting or moving ways. That’s the feeling part.

The next part is about looking, about the intense visual focus on the scene before me. What am I really seeing? Not a pond, but a yellow streak of light here and a purple one there, a swoop of maroon shadow down here. It is a kind of focus that is hard to come by in a busy life, and yet when it happens, the clutter just goes away and time stops. Sometimes paintings worth looking at emerge; sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, I start again, with another layer of paint, knowing that that failed first layer beneath may very well emerge in some cool and unexpected ways in the next iteration. I have to push against the impulse to be literal. I know that when I start picking smaller and smaller brushes to recreate things exactly as they appear in the photograph, I am going down a disappointing path. Emily Dickinson, in a poem that seems to describe what she thinks about writing poetry, expresses a similar idea: Tell All the Truth/But Tell it Slant.” Clearly, I have trouble letting go of the English teacher that I have been for thirty years. But sometimes, when I am using big brushes, gobs of paint, layers of failures, and a certain slant of light, I can be a painter, too.