About The Deluge
Artist Bill Russell shares his painting process and a creative response to Climate Change
As a painter and a visual journalist, I seek to share meaningful narratives in my work. Given our Anthropocene, where human activity has influenced our climate and environment so dramatically, I feel an urgency to educate these dire messages through my art. I’ve witnessed massive and tragic forest and home fires rampage through my Northern California community. The devastation, wrought with warmer, drier conditions is in part the product of global warming.
I felt shocked and saddened seeing destroyed homes and displaced people by the Valley Fire in 2015. I was motivated to produce art that captured this emotion and attempted to understand how it happened.
With fellow Urban Sketchers, I drew attendees and activists at the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco and helped tell their stories, like Molly and Bill shown in these drawings.
A warming planet means a warming ocean. Rising water temperatures can trigger coral to expel the colorful algae living in their tissue, which turns the coral sickly white. For my painting Coral Diptych, I show before and after views of this effect and wanted to bring focus to this unseen ruination.
In my new painting The Deluge, I found inspiration in two famous paintings.
Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, painted in the spring of 1873, depicts the urban-industrial landscape at the port of Le Havre, France with small rowboats in the foreground, smokestacks and steamships in the middle ground and a red sun in the far distance. Monet found beauty in the picturesque atmospheric effects in the commingling of mist, steam, fog, and smoke.
In Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa desperate yet romanticized figures are shown adrift on turbulent seas. They are unable to see their survival on the horizon. Like these sailors, we are confronted with an unknowable beyond. Will science inform and will taking actions change our own foreboding future?
The Deluge (shown at the top of the page) builds upon my interest in human influenced ecology that brings discord to our planet, and how coastal cities are being affected by our rising seas due to global warming. The sun bears down through our depleted atmosphere, melting our polar ice caps, setting icebergs adrift, and in turn, with sea levels rising, unmooring iconic artifacts of our culture. These ancient icebergs don’t cause sea levels to rise, but hold an invaluable record of our planet’s climate history.
Here are a few details from the painting showing some of these metaphoric artifacts.
There are very present dangers facing our planet with climate change. Look to the artists and their work to illuminate and educate.
Find more paintings at BillRussellFineArt.com and reportage at RussellReportage.com. Artists sketching climate stories can be found at SketchingClimateStories.com
About Bill: Bill Russell is a painter, illustrator and designer based in Marin County, California. He earned his degree from Parsons School of Design in New York. He was an Adjunct Professor of Illustration at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, as well as a staff artist at the San Francisco Chronicle. He completed artist residencies at Recology and the Kala Art Institute.
Email Bill here.
