Richard Russell’s Shakespeare

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The Fair Ophelia: Hamlet by Richard Lance Russell

Richard Russell takes satisfaction in problem-solving. It’s one of the things, he says, that attracted him to painting. Whether he’s depicting scenes from around his home in Blanding, Utah, or interpreting key moments from Shakespearean plays, he’s intrigued by all the choices an artist must make to tell the human story.

Russell grew up in the Salt Lake Valley and attended Brigham Young University. The sciences, with their own set of problems to be solved, fought with the arts for his interests, but he ultimately decided to commit himself to his brushes. He enrolled in the University’s illustration department because it was only there, with professors like Ralph Barksdale, that he felt he could learn the “painterly, academic style” he was interested in. After graduation he completed an internship with Burt Silverman in New York before returning to Utah and settling in Blanding, where his wife Josie, a native of nearby Monticello, teaches English at the Southern Utah University extension.

“Sunburst” by Richard Russell

A small town in the remote Four Corners area of the state, Blanding is an inspiring place for his landscapes, says Russell, and it is relatively close to his Santa Fe gallery, where Southwest motifs do well. But living in the town of 2000 does pose a problem for an artist also interested in doing period pieces: costumes are hard to come by, and his New Mexico audience isn’t exactly lining up for paintings of Renaissance England.

Russell first got hooked on Shakespeare when at sixteen he attended a performance of Macbeth at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Seeing the words performed on stage did something for him. “I said, ‘Wow, I get it. There’s a lot of depth here I didn’t get just trying to read it through’ . . . When you have the actor there you understand what they’re struggling with and it has a lot of meaning.” Because the words on the page became real human stories when Russell saw them acted on the stage, they also became material for his work. “When I do a painting I am trying to tell something. Like any artist, whether it’s a musician, a painter, an actor, . . . you’re trying to tell the human story.” So as Shakespeare’s stories settled in his mind, they began to develop as paintings. He completed a few Shakespearian-themed works, but soon found his desire to do more frustrated by a lack of models and costume.

Kiss Me Kate: The Taming of the Shrew by Richard Lance Russell

Then, while attending the Utah Arts Council’s Mountain West Conference of the Arts in Salt Lake City last year, Josie ran into Scott Phillips, Executive Director for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. When she told him Russell had been painting Shakespeare scenes but had trouble finding costumes, Phillips said the festival could help. He also thought they could help with an audience: what would her husband think about exhibiting at the 2012 festival?

Problems solved. Sort of.

With the Colorado Plateau in the way, Cedar City was still more than a five-hour drive; and while the costumes were available, actor guild regulations meant Russell would have to find others to embody them. The festival eventually created for him a list of local volunteers who were willing to serve as models for his project. In Blanding, he studied their headshots, planning his scenes and casting roles. But for all his planning, once he got to Cedar City to shoot his source material he had to ad lib.

“It’s organic,” he says. “I definitely had a strong idea sketched out of what I wanted to attempt . . . but there’s something magical that happens when you bring the person and the costume together and you describe the scene and the emotions.” Like a casting director, Russell found himself shifting his models into new costumes, moving them into additional or different scenes, developing a groups shot where originally he had only considered a pair. “I can see how [a director] can go through a hundred people for a part before finally say, yes, that’s what I want.”

: Tis Mine and I Will Have It: The Merchant of Venice by Richard Lance Russell

: Sweet Soul, Take Heed: Othello by Richard Lance Russell

: “Will These Hands Ne’er Be Clean? Macbeth by Richard Lance Russell

Russell says his understanding of a play is sometimes an amalgamation of several performances, but other times a specific performance will stick in his mind. A few years ago he saw a performance of “The Taming of the Shrew” that finally made the piece come alive for him. “I was blown away. I had never really loved the play before that,” he says of the performance in Cedar City. “It’s the relationship that’s fun in that play. The ying and yang, the push and pull they have.” He represented that dynamic by showing Katherina and Petruchio from above, their bodies forming a diagonal across the picture plane as Katherina pulls away and Petruchio leans back laughing.

How to interpret the varied themes and characters in Shakespeare is no easy task. Russell says his paintings vary in how they solve the problem. They might focus on a specific relationship, like in The Shrew. Or they might focus on a theme: for The Merchant of Venice he concentrated on Shylock as a solitary figure, the firmly clenched dagger behind his back pointing to his obsessive passion. Or the painting might even be extra-textual: his image of Ophelia running along the river does no harm to the text, but isn’t actually in it.

Over the past year Russell made a total of four trips to Cedar City, experimenting with costumes, changing the lighting, collecting his source material. After getting the sketches fully developed he worked his themes in oil. The result is more than a dozen paintings, — depicting a range of works from the comedies, romances, tragedies and histories — that are on exhibit at the Randall L. Jones theatre in Cedar City for the 2012 season. His partnership with the Utah Shakespeare Festival festival has been fruitful: he has a number of paintings still on the easel that may be substituted in during the four months of the exhibit, and is already thinking through ways to tackle additional plays.

Truth, Mirth and Turmoil: Shakespeare Paintings by Richard Lance Russell is in the Randall L. Jones Theater Gallery in Cedar City through October. Reproductions of the works are also available. You can view more of Russell’s paintings at richardrussellart.com. For more on the Utah Shakespeare Festival visit www.bard.org.