Over Russell Frampton
Russell Frampton was born in Warsash on the Hampshire coast of England in 1961, he studied painting at Portsmouth College of Art, Exeter college of Art and Design and Plymouth University where he gained an MA in Fine Art in 2002. He is based in Devon UK where he runs his studio.
He has many years of lecturing experience at the University of Plymouth and as a lecturer in Painting at Plymouth college of Art for the past five years. His practice involves often multi disciplinary approaches to both painting and constructional pieces. Core values inherent in the work are a strong design aesthetic, fluidity of application and layering, and the professional production of work with an understanding of current and contemporary approaches to painting.
He has exhibited widely and has participated in many AAF’s in London, Paris and the USA. His work can be found many national and international collections including Lloyds Bank UK, Cambridge University UK, Exeter University UK, and recently a series of his gold discs have become the unofficial ‘logo’ artwork in many Louis Vuitton stores around the world, including Rome, Tokyo, New York and in Germany, Russia and Australia.
Russell’s work stems from deep connections with the experience of landscape, specifically the moorlands and coasts of the West Country and the coastal fringes of West Brittany where he had a studio for many years. Landscape also is the receptacle of history both geologic and anthropological, which have had a direct influence on recent works.
Trips to Australia and New Zealand and the Basque country of Northern Spain have provided rich new seams to explore and aspects of his constructional paintings are directly related to motifs and iconography associated with prehistoric cultures and the art of remote peoples.
Whilst many of the paintings are direct responses to places and experiences within landscapes, the formal structure of the work is primarily abstract, in the sense that the work is not representing degrees of ‘realistic’ representation. The concerns are as much with the making of an object and the building of a painting that refers to painting itself than to content, as the painter Roger Hilton notes:
“Abstract art is the result of an attempt to make pictures more real, an attempt to come nearer to the essence of painting.”
Some conceptual concerns he is currently exploring include aspects of ‘imagined archaeology’, where responses to the making of the solar discs and shield series are informed by detailed research into historical artefacts and ritualistic objects. The range of his practice extends to abstracted landscape, screendance film, collaged ‘painterly’ compositions and paintings that refer to historical alchemical lore and symbolism.
He works with a range of paint based materials, gold leaf and metallic leaf on wooden supports and on canvas and board. Much of the painting uses acrylic and inks, as the fluidity and intensity of the colour allow for more refined processes that maintain a vitality of brushwork. He combines an exacting compositional set of values with a juxtaposition between the ‘micro’ mark and the larger mark/area to generate a complex inter relationship between marks, colour and space and texture and depth of surface are also crucial elements within the painting.
