Russell Mang
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| Last Light | | Acrylic on w/c paper over canvas | | 24 x 12 Inches | $ 820
(includes frame) |
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(Please email the gallery to be notified when new work by Russell Mang arrives.)
Russell was born in Melville, Sask., in 1958. He attended the University of Regina and graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
From an early age, he explored a natural aptitude for watercolours and is self-taught in that medium.
He began his professional career 1982-83, starting out with watercolour landscapes, preferring to work on location whenever possible.
In 1987, he left Regina, moving to Vancouver. The loss of his father in 1988 saw him developing a deeper, more
meditative approach to art-making and subject matter. Unlike his early prairie landscapes, which were attempts to record an emotional response to the land, his BC landscapes became a ‘vocabulary’ to speak of and describe an inner journey of a spiritual
and meditative nature.
This journey led him to try other mediums such as graphite, soft pastels and oil sticks; mediums that he found to be much more ‘interactive’ than watercolours alone.
The course of experimenting with these other
mediums led to a much more focused and deliberate approach to colour, unlike the mostly intuitive approach he was used to. Artist soft pastels were especially helpful in beginning to really understand what he calls ‘colour mechanics’, the manner in which
colours interact and influence each other. This role of colour took on an increasing importance as he continued to further develop landscape as the vocabulary of articulating his inner life.
In the summer of 2000, the death of a family member
led to he and his wife resolving to move closer to their home province of Saskatchewan and in 2001 they moved to Calgary.
Russell’s current work since the latter part of 2002 has been a process of slowly returning to his first love, the prairie
landscape, exploring close and more intimate views as well as sweeping vistas of sky and earth. His current medium of choice is acrylics and is re-exploring oils, as well.
