Sitting in Richard Russell’s basement studio in midtown Atlanta feels like being in some sort of eccentric Modernist submarine. The space is windowless and small, full of tightly packed shelves, meticulously organized, stylishly appointed, and strangely cozy. Interspersed with the traditional art supplies is an oddball collection of objects d’art, shrine-like candle arrangements, travel mementos, and the cartoon devil figurines Russell considers his personal mascots.

Russell, 46, uses this studio to create collages and sketchbooks.  His work is a mash-up of obscure and disparate elements, incorporating everything from art history textbooks to diagrams of early diesel engines. He uses these images and textures to create wonderland environments that are part pictorial, part graphic, and part textural.

Russell’s imagery, romantic and surreal, abounds in drapery, Italian palazzos, wood texture, outsized moths and flowers, figures assembled Frankenstein-like from various Renaissance paintings, and realistically illustrated sufferers of every malady that can be found in a 19th century medical textbook. He covers his pieces with layers of beeswax that give them a warmth, luminosity, and old-world feel that is accentuated by his muted, earth tone palette.

Most of Russell’s collages are created on wood panels which measure less than a foot in either dimension. The scale of his pieces gives them a book-like, intimate feel. Images wrap onto the edges of the panels, which are often raised two or three inches.

After a few abortive attempts to study graphic design, Russell graduated in 1990 with a BFA in photography from the Atlanta College of Art. Ironically, a few years after undergraduate school he went on to work professionally as a graphic designer while creating and exhibiting his own photography and collage work.

Since graduating college, Russell has exhibited regularly in group and solo shows in the U.S. and Europe. In 2008 he was a finalist for the Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and in 2009 he was named a fellow in the Hambidge Center for the Arts & Sciences artist-in-residence program. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Virginia Commonwealth University, the New York Public Library, and the Sackner Collection of Visual and Concrete Poetry in Miami.

Recently, I visited Russell to talk about his artwork, imagery, and the role of sketchbooks in his creative process.

Bob: I’ve heard you say in that past that when you work with sketchbooks, you do them primarily as finished pieces. How is the process of creating a sketchbook as a finished piece different for you than creating a single piece or series in another medium?

Richard: When I work in sketchbooks, individual pages are pieces and the entire thing cover to cover is a larger piece. So it’s not “here’s a contained piece, here’s a contained piece” — it’s a lot of contained pieces that flow together, reference each other, work back and forth across the pages. There’s a continuation, there’s a narrative of some sort built up. It’s not necessarily planned: there may be a theme originally but then it goes into several tangents, lots of branch-outs, then circles back to the original theme here and there.

Bob: So when you begin one of these sketchbooks do you have a theme in mind, or does it grow as the work evolves?

Richard: The themes change. Occasionally there is something set up at the beginning that I’ll follow. Sometimes I just dive in, start working, see where it leads me and what themes emerge.

Bob: Do ideas for these themes come from the same places as ideas for individual pieces or series?

Richard: The sketchbooks are usually very personal. They revolve around my mood or something that’s happening to me at the time that I’m working on it. They’re more based in emotion; they’re a process I use to work through things that are happening. So they’re sort of visual therapy for me.

Bob: What is it about sketchbooks that they are more personal or therapeutic than some of your other work?

Richard: They’re more of a journal, they’re more immediate. I can do small, quick, daily pieces based on “I thought about this today, this happened to me today, I worked on this today, I saw this happen.” So they’re instant snapshots, whereas larger pieces are done over a longer course of time. The larger pieces are meant specifically to be displayed, to be put on a wall for public viewing. Not that I don’t show the sketchbooks – or wouldn’t – but they are more personal and immediate.

Bob: Do your sketchbooks combine writing and images?

Richard: They don’t include writing per se, they’re visual storytelling. They’re not a journal as in I’m making notes about something. They’re a pictorial representation. I may use text, but I don’t write a story or write a list or write a paragraph.

Bob: Is it true that the art you do outside of sketchbooks is done almost exclusively in series?

Richard: Yes and no. Themes, overarching themes or motifs might be a better description than series. I have done several series, but in the past couple years, I would use the term series loosely if at all because the work isn’t based on a narrative. There’s narrative involved, but there’s not a continual narrative, or a continuing narrative. The work is usually based on a continuing exploration of a topic or theme. So I might start with a piece and say, “I like that idea, I want to do a little more based on that or that visual representation, I want to take that a little further.” I’m not sure that makes them a series necessarily.

Bob: Maybe “theme” might be a more accurate description than series, then.

Richard: Right. Until I go back to having a sort of a story framework or a planned narrative, I think I’m just going to continue with the visual themes. It might be a theme that I’ve got more in my head than anybody else might notice sometimes. But there is usually a narrative or dialog within the piece, in the piece with itself, in the piece with the viewer, in the piece with me.

Bob: Is this implicit dialog? Are there actual words?

Richard: There may be text, but generally the text is not the dialog. The dialog is when you approach the piece, what story does it tell you or what story do you put into it? What do you give it or apply to it?

Bob: Tell me a little bit more about your process of research and how you get the initial ideas that inspire the work you do.

Richard: That’s kind of tough because sometimes I start out with an idea. I might get a phrase, or I might have the title in advance, and start building images from that. Or I might have a line that I heard in a song or a story, and build from there. Or I might just find a particular image and want to build out from that image or combination of images. Sometimes I just sit down with a blank board or a piece of paper and start going through files and laying stuff out with no idea whatsoever in mind. I just start piecing the images together, and then refine, and pull back, and edit, and then maybe start the process over on a certain level. Or I find one central image and I get the accessory images in different layers or in different rounds, there’s a lot of editing, going through different folders, pulling this out, asking whether or not things are working. And I might go through the whole process and think I found something and start all over again.

Bob: So you mentioned pulling some images from files. Do you keep files of images for the collages?

Richard: I keep a full file cabinet and I arrange things in all these different hierarchies, like I mentioned in the artist’s statement. There’s all these different filing – a major and overall filing system, but within that there are categories: so there’s art history, there are animal folders, with things from zoology books: dogs, cats, horses, fish, frogs, snakes, birds, bees. There are flowers, fruit, medicinal plants; there’s anatomy, especially in scientific images. And then there are the flat files, with all of the large prints and etchings, mostly zoology or landscape or architecture. I don’t really use the images from them, I use the backs of the paper. The images bleed through but it’s not about the etching part of it itself, in most cases.

Bob: Are you after some quality that the paper has?

Richard: It’s because of the patina, the age, the mold, the water damage. I don’t like crisp, stark, new white paper. Similarly, I don’t like new apartments or brand new houses. I like them to have a little age and have a little history and that used quality. I like layers of paint. I like things that are chipped and broken and have wear on them. They have character. It’s also the history of what I’m making; it adds a certain spirit or soul to it that brand new, fresh stuff doesn’t have yet. So I want some of that to be built in.

Bob: You mean because these component parts you’re putting together have had a life prior to you finding them?

Richard: And now they’re going to have a new life so everything is re-purposed. Collage is re-purposing, so I’m just taking that a little further and even re-purposing my materials. And a lot of what I do with the old paper is not only using it as backgrounds but I reprint some of my images on that to add even more of that. Since I don’t necessarily want to use the original images all the time I will scan those, tweak them, and reprint them on the antique paper.

Bob: So how did you decide on what categories of images to collect?

Richard: It’s just based on personal language, and the way my imagery works I know that I’m not going to use certain things. I’m not going to have a lot of cute baby-fairy-elf images, but I might build of those things from other parts. I like the anatomy images because I build characters and bodies and people, sort of do the Frankenstein thing, and build up from those anatomical parts. I could do the same from art history and from paintings, because I will occasionally replace a head on one piece from a head on another, or if the arm doesn’t go the right way, I’ll take the arm off an switch it out.

Bob: Is there a reason that you tend to assemble people from different pieces? Are you concerned that a person might look at a piece of yours, see a figure from a famous work, and get stuck in that?

Richard: That context changes from piece to piece, but generally speaking I try to use less-known original works when I can. And when I can’t, I’ll just take segments of them, because yeah, there are a certain associations and contexts. If you use a Reubens base you automatically put yourself in 17th century Flemish Renaissance, or Flemish Baroque, time period. You’re automatically in Northern Europe. To somebody that doesn’t know anything about art history it’s just a person with a frilly lace collar on.

Bob: When you sit down in the studio to start working on a given day, is there anything you do to kind of prepare yourself?

Richard: That’s what I’ve been working on for a while now, and I’m trying to figure out a routine, or a ceremony, or a ritual to drop myself into that creative mode. Coming home from work, or going out to dinner with friends, or just having dinner upstairs or whatever and just coming down to the studio and saying, ‘OK, I’m working now.’ I’m in this place now. And that hasn’t been entirely successful. It’s something I’m finding that I just can’t fabricate that feeling, I have to start and I will drop into the piece. I can’t just click myself into that mode.

Bob: Now is it pretty reliable that you’ll, as you say, drop into the piece?

Richard: Not necessarily. I drop in to the piece or I don’t. And I haven’t yet been able to figure out what the surrounding circumstances are that might encourage that. And that’s what I’m working on now. What do I need around me? What do I need to listen to? What do I need to wear, or what do I need to eat to get there quicker? Or is it dependent on any of those things at all and is it just my head? Sometimes I look up and I’m already finished working, I must have just dropped into that piece without realizing it. So I don’t think it’s something I can turn on or off. It’s still a big experiment. Now I just jump in, do the work, and drop or not.