{"id":11786,"date":"2012-07-05T00:12:44","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T06:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=11786"},"modified":"2025-11-27T08:10:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T15:10:12","slug":"richard-russells-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/richard-russells-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Russell\u2019s Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Fair Ophelia: Hamlet by Richard Lance Russell<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s intrigued by all the choices an artist must make to tell the human story.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s illustration department because it was only there, with professors like Ralph Barksdale, that he felt he could learn the \u201cpainterly, academic style\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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“Sunburst” by Richard Russell<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019t exactly lining up for paintings of Renaissance England.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI said, \u2018Wow, I get it. There\u2019s a lot of depth here I didn\u2019t get just trying to read it through\u2019 . . . When you have the actor there you understand what they\u2019re struggling with and it has a lot of meaning.\u201d 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. \u201cWhen I do a painting I am trying to tell something. Like any artist, whether it\u2019s a musician, a painter, an actor, . . . you\u2019re trying to tell the human story.\u201d So as Shakespeare\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Kiss Me Kate: The Taming of the Shrew by Richard Lance Russell<\/p><\/div>\n

Then, while attending the Utah Arts Council\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Problems solved. Sort of.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s organic,\u201d he says. \u201cI definitely had a strong idea sketched out of what I wanted to attempt . . . but there\u2019s something magical that happens when you bring the person and the costume together and you describe the scene and the emotions.\u201d 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. \u201cI can see how [a director] can go through a hundred people for a part before finally say, yes, that\u2019s what I want.\u201d<\/p>\n