The world around as it is. Strange colorful paintings from Russell West's past

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Shock, shock, surprise and conquer. Sometimes it seems that it is according to this scheme that many representatives of contemporary art live and create, developing, strengthening and actively complementing the indicated scheme of influencing human consciousness. Therefore, it is difficult to determine from the first time whether the artist actually perceives reality differently, depicting in his paintings something incomprehensible, but colorful, and thereby attracting attention, or whether it was a distracting maneuver, carefully thought out and planned, like the next move of a chess player. British artist Russell West just from this category of painters, leaving more questions about themselves than answers, and a whole collection of strange, but bright and colorful paintings. After leaving his native Portsmouth in 1989, the young graphic artist traveled to Asia, where he lived and worked for a long time in Hong Kong, the Philippines and India, before returning home to England. This had the main influence on the formation of the author's style and that very famous individual view of the reality around us. However, having visited the famous Kowloon, the Chinese city behind a high wall, which is essentially a huge hostel, anyone will look at the world from a different angle. No joke, with an area of only 0.026 square kilometers, the population density at that time reached two million people per square kilometer. And even despite the fact that today Kowloon is blooming and turning green, and no longer resembles the "fortress city" that he was in the 90s, the artist's memories of this period remain as vivid as his paintings.

Russell West's strange multi-colored canvases, which look more like an explosion at a paint and varnish factory or experiments in color therapy classes, in his usual manner depict the cityscape of that real, non-tourist Asia, as he saw it. Slums and disadvantaged areas, neighborhoods densely populated by motley guest workers from third world countries, who brought with them not only their entire large family, but also traditions, culture, life, each of which has its own color in the artist's palette. Flowing down and mixing, they symbolize the process of infusion of these cultures into one another, mixing of traditions, languages, lifestyles … And as a result of this, such a motley picture is obtained, which is difficult to understand not only for an outside observer, but also for those who are directly involved in the process of forming this separately taken reality.

Today Russell West lives and works in the UK on the Isle of Wight. Through photographs, drawings and sculptures, over the years he has been trying to recreate what he first saw in the walled city of Kowloon, and later in India, the Philippines and other Asian countries, where people live poorly, but brightly, painting the dull gray everyday life colorful clothes, walls of houses, homemade decorations. You can see the entire series of strange paintings on the artist's website.