Russ Warren

Painting

Lives and works in Charlottesville, VA
(b. 1951, American)

Q: If you were a paint color in the hardware store, what would it be called? And can you describe the color?

A: “Hardware stores don’t carry my color, which is Cadmium Red Light, an atomic like scarlet red to be used only sparingly. It’s retina like dangerous.”

Details

Inspired by Spanish masters including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso, as well as Mexican folk art and contemporary artists like Roy de Forest and Jim Nutt, the themes found in Warren’s work are not unlike the ideas explored by the masters he admires – heaven and hell, good-bad, love-hate, dark and light, day-night, birth-death. Synthesizing symbols and imagery, his compositions and narratives are increasingly complicated and highlight the versatility of his painting techniques and his affection for vivid color ranges.

ABOUT

Russ Warren was born in Washington, DC in 1951, grew up in Houston, Texas and began his training as an artist at the University of St. Thomas, Houston in 1969.
He received his BFA in 1973 from the University of New Mexico and received his MFA in 1977 from the University of Texas in San Antonio.
Warren taught painting and printmaking at Davidson College from 1978 – 2008 and exhibited widely throughout the state of North Carolina in these years.
Warren’s work has been widely exhibited in such shows as the Whitney Biennial (1981) and the Venice Biennale (1984) and is part of many private and public collections including Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC); Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN); Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC0; North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC); New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA); and Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ), to name a few.
His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Arts Magazine, Art in America among others.