Tassie Russell

About

Tassie Russell studied painting at the University of Kingston, cultural history at the Royal College of Art, postgraduate printmaking at the Slade School and photography at St Martins College of Art.

Russell’s work is informed by an ability to handle her materials, by wide-ranging cultural references, her love for travel, and a willingness to push herself with fresh ideas and experimentation. Best known for large canvases with subdued colour and nuanced use of geometric form, travel for Russell, as for many artists, is the impetus for new work. A recent trip to Colombia resulted in a series of paintings with brighter colours and more organic forms.

Reflecting her interest in painters who move back and forth between the figurative and the non figurative, like Richard Diebenkorn, Russell searches constantly for compelling compositions of architectural space. The inspiration may be a building or a landscape, but the solution is always achieved by a lengthy reworking in the studio. These are hard-won images from a mature and subtle artist.

Russell does not limit herself to one medium and tackles each new process with precision, always open to improvise and adapt. In her printmaking, she uses etching, carborundum and chine colle to create dramatic pieces that combine free brush strokes with structured drawings. As a photographer, Russell often still uses a medium format film camera together with a selection of specially constructed pinhole cameras to photograph forgotten domestic interiors and abstracted elements in the landscape .

Russell’s work has abeen widely shown and is held in private and public collections, including Clifford Chance LLP. She was awarded the Clifford Chance Purchase Prize selected by the late Sir Terry Frost. She has taught in universities in the UK and Australia.

She works from her painting and printmaking studio in Suffolk.

Russell owns an apartment in the heart of Lisbon, Portugal available for short term lets.