George E. Russell
Canadian painter, watercolourist, draftsman, sculptor, screen printing artist
George Ellis Russell (January 23, 1933 – May 8, 2016) was a Canadian painter and art teacher known for his philanthropy. His hexagonal paintings are filled with geometric shapes and pure colours. Creating hundred of artworks in his signature hexagonal format, his work is in the same family as Les Plasticiens, a close relative to Claude Tousignant's circles and Guido Molinari's stripes. His art was also strongly influenced by the Op Art mouvement.
Early life and training
Russell was born in Viscount, Saskatchewan.
His formal training began at the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops (affiliated with the Art department of University of Saskatchewan) where the influential art critic Clement Greenberg presented the work of Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland to a Canadian audience in 1962. Russell was influenced by Modernist styles in painting and sculpture emerging in Saskatchewan at that time which he credited to both the presence of American-educated art professors and the frequent visits of Clement Greenberg.
He later pursued a Masters of Art at Concordia University in 1969. This change in location provided the opportunity to discover Quebec's erupting artistic scene post Refus Global. It was then that his practice became transformed to one involving abstraction and geometry.
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This entry incorporates text from “George E. Russell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.