Final Don Russell largescale painting from Water Meditations series placed

The last available largescale painting from Don Russell's "Water Meditations" series has just been placed. Above can be seen "January 9, 2005" (56 x 80 inches, oil on canvas) which now has a home with a Toronto collector. Other works in the series have found their way into other important collections including that of the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre of the University of Guelph and (see below) the National Capitol Commission's Canadiana Fund.

This series is aptly named as Russell's paintings have a calm-inducing serenity to them. Their three-dimensionality also draw you into the works to the point that you imagine you are either standing on the edge of a vessel or the very edge of a shore, or, in a more fantastical mode, flying like a seabird just above the water surface. While Russell's current work has taken him firmly landward with a new series of paintings being prepared for his two-person "Snow" exhibition with Amir Shingray (end of November 2008 to mid-January 2009), he will be available for commissions of new "Water Meditations" work once the "Snow" works have been completed for the upcoming show.

The above "January 5, 2005" work is very representative of the style of work in the series, although each work is remarkably different even as it is clearly of one kind with the others. The occasional work in the series is a radical departure from the others, perhaps most notably "Singing Sands" (58 x 75 inches, oil on canvas) reproduced below. The Canadiana Fund acquired this work after it was shown as the centrepiece at Craig Scott Gallery in Russell's Elements of Memory show in fall 2006. Observe the marvellous cross-over in the imagery of rippling sand under the surface of shallow water and the furrows of a cerebral cortex.