{"id":26766,"date":"2014-10-07T00:17:45","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T06:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=26766"},"modified":"2018-11-27T10:01:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-27T16:01:16","slug":"ron-russon-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/ron-russon-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Abstractions: Ron Russon at Utah Artist Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Sometimes what an artist most needs to get going, says artist Ron Russon, \u201cis a kick in the butt.\u201d The Lehi artist graduated from BYU in 1996 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and Design and was doing well working on books and magazines and commercial projects when the digital era caught up with him and began raining on his parade. \u201cThese guys who had been illustrating for 40 or 50 years discovered the scanner, that scanned 50 years worth of images. They put all of it on one disk, and sold the rights,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, in one year, the same job that was $2200 went to $300.\u201d At that point, he says, the fine art market became flooded with former illustrators.<\/p>\n

Russon was one of them, and this digital \u201ckick in the butt\u201d nudged him into a career he was always interested in but had avoided. \u201cI come from an agrarian background, farming, so it\u2019s really about practicality\u201d he says. \u201cWith art, you can\u2019t eat it, you can\u2019t live in it, and so it is really impractical from my background.\u201d But now, after more than a decade as a fine artist, he says, \u201cI\u2019d live in a box if I had to because this is the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russon\u2019s agrarian background and career in illustration can be seen in his paintings, which depict practical things like farmland and machinery, but with a highly developed sense of design that modulates various abstract elements. His paintings are also charged with a well-developed spiritual and metaphorical sensibility. \u00a0\u201cFor me, my story comes from the religious aspect,\u201d the artist says, \u201cor if I\u2019m dealing with an issue of my own, I see it from a spiritual perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russon says he likes to work with the number three, a numeral with a longstanding religious connotation. In his landscape \u201cGreen Hill\u201d we find in the center three red trees.\u00a0 The implications in this painting are too vast to grapple with, but as Russon describes it, the line falling vertically could represent ancestry; it also represents one\u2019s own past, a personal history, the passage of time; and the central bold line of red in the ground represents the present. There is a certain practicality to this approach; a utility to it, there is substance to this that is the kind that comes from the agrarian, the farmer, but the structures, the abstract compositions, come from the artist.<\/p>\n

In Russon\u2019s wildlife paintings the animals become strong metaphorical presences while always remaining themselves. The animals become talismans for attributes we might look for in ourselves or others precisely because of what they are. In \u201cWolf Trio\u201d Russon focuses on the structure of the bodies, and like a cubist, looks for the truth of the form, in and of itself, representational of the animals\u2019 strength, its natural beauty and creation. The wolf is strong and is a pack animal. It will defend the other, it will fight for the pack, hunt and kill. The wolf already IS the metaphor for attributes that Russon\u2019s audience might relate to or aspire to.<\/p>\n

In his \u201cBison Tribes\u201d the background is literal in substance even though its whole has been abstracted into a webbing of forest, a dense and fibrous articulation of flora that looks almost jungle-like. In the space that distinguishes it, we find a very bright pale salmon pink that seeps through. Like in a Warhol serigraph, Russon has coded identical rows of bison with different colors: orange, turquoise, yellow, and steel blue. How is this in any way practical? By using the literal metaphor of the animal and the character of the bison, by what we see on the canvas in this abstract articulation of form, we discover the reality of these animals, and we project the essences and ideals of ourselves as we perceive these creatures.\u00a0 They are each in a tribe, assuming a unique color, and in that tribe \u2014 again the number three is adhered to \u2014 one follows the other, and is secured to and grounded by the other.\u00a0 One is never alone. Yet there is a mass, a universality to the total, a universality of difference, that together finds a unity in a harmony of commonality and likeness, yet each remains the same in their essential differences, guided by the other, through the density and through and towards the light.<\/p>\n

Ron Russon\u2019s \u201ckick in the butt\u201d was the result of economic factors beyond his control. But in losing his job, he found his calling, and with the singular style he has developed over countless hours he is able to explore his own spirituality and humanity in an authentic and, for his audience, highly revelatory way.<\/p>\n

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Ron Russon\u2019s paintings will be on exhibit at\u00a0Utah Artist Hands\u00a0<\/a>beginning with a\u00a0Gallery Stroll<\/a>\u00a0reception on Friday, October 17, 6-9 pm and continuing through November 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes what an artist most needs to get going, says artist Ron Russon, \u201cis a kick in the butt.\u201d The Lehi artist graduated from BYU in 1996 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and Design and was doing well working on books and magazines and commercial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":26821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Wolf_Trio.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 12:27:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26766"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40478,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26766\/revisions\/40478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}