In Conversation with Artist Doug Russell (Part 1)

In 2008 I visited Turkey for the first time as a student from the University of Wyoming.  Together with nine of my classmates, I participated in a summer abroad course lead by artist and Professor of Drawing, Doug Russell.  On a recent trip to Wyoming, I caught up with Doug to discuss his experiences in Turkey and his personal direction as an artist.

Give us some background on what first brought you to Turkey.

I first moved to Turkey in 1997 mostly because I had some friends already living there and teaching.  I taught both art and English at Uludağ University in Bursa for two years.  I had planned on moving abroad for quite a while and moving to Turkey was the first real opportunity.

How have your experiences in Turkey inspired your artwork?

When I moved to Turkey I found many things I hadn’t seen before.  I also discovered a lot of new things about myself by living there and was really inspired by being in a whole different culture, being in a place with such immense history, being in a foreign environment where I had to figure out what that meant to me.  So all of those things became pretty fascinating as an artist and as an individual.  It took me a long time to figure out how to put that into my work.  While I was over there I tried to do it but that didn’t work so well.  When I first came back from Turkey, I tried to put it into play.  Finally, in 2010, things really started to integrate.  It had always been under the surface, but the studio work really came together with my interest in the country around that time, and has continued on since then.

How would you describe what you are currently working on?

Well, the main thing is that I enjoy drawing, and drawing is the key component to what I do; I enjoy the mechanics of it, the call and response of it, that’s the most important thing.

Secondly, I enjoy drawing some things more than others.  When I am traveling in Turkey, I mostly draw ruins and urban scenes.  Architecture has become the primary focus of what I do. So there is a whole series of work that is just drawing directly from observation. The studio work ends up being an attempt to go beyond merely recording what I am seeing and trying to interpret or re-present or give back to the viewer something more, something about how I am feeling in Turkey when I am traveling and drawing.  What does it feel like to be in front of something that has such immense history to it, or layers of history, or layers of culture, layers of meaning even… and so the work has played off of that by improvising and inventing and combining and recombining imagery and ideas from traveling through Turkey, often in large, architectural fantasies of different kinds.

Are there any Turkish artists that you find inspiring? 

I feel the most kinship towards photographer and Professor Murat Germen.  We met because I contacted him as I was preparing to bring my first group of students to Turkey for a month long class of drawing on location, and he has been very gracious by meeting with the students every time since then.  We are both interested in architecture. I love architecture and drawing it, and he has degrees in urban planning and architecture, and that is what he is most interested in photographing.  His photos collapse and combine architecture in a similar way to my work. Even though he is talking about urbanization, and I am talking about time and history, it still results in a similar sort of look.

What do you find to be the most striking differences between living in Turkey and living in the United States?

Life in the U.S. is predictable to a degree… more convenient and easier, but therefore more boring.  In Turkey, things are unpredictable, a little chaotic, complicated and difficult… but therefore more exciting, invigorating, and not typical.

Also, again, the sense of history. The visual evidence of human history in the United States is thin.  In Turkey, the overwhelming sense of history, including really important people like Alexander and Justinian, and Suleyman.  The sense of these things is more powerfully evident, the larger arc of human history is more easily glimpsed there, and its it is simply more fascinating for me to be inside of that.

I enjoy the newness of the United States, its simplicity and clarity.  In contrast there is the Mediterranean culture, the more chaotic emotional thing that happens in Turkey, that is inviting but difficult at the same time.  In the U.S. everything is laid out and everyone has their division. Turkey is messy, and there is no strong sense of clarity.  Yet in the space that this chaos creates, there is room to be creative, to be an artist and to find yourself.  The pressure to be perfect, to be “on” all the time, it’s not there in the same way.  When I come back to the United States after being in Turkey, it feels oppressively perfect.  There is an oppressive element and expectation of happiness and success in this country.

You can read Part 2 of this conversation here. 

To see more of Doug’s work, you can visit his website, russellfineart.com and follow his blog, russellfineart.wordpress.com