Vivien Russe was born in Seattle and grew up in Cleveland. After graduating from Radcliffe College, she went on to study printmaking at the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, then moved to an island in Casco Bay, Maine. She was awarded the Bingham Prize in 1991 and has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is represented by Sarah Bouchard Gallery and lives and works in South Portland, Maine.

 

Image: What kinds of early experiences did you have that felt spiritual, either then or in retrospect?

VR: Although I was raised as an Episcopalian, there was a strong streak of skepticism, or more accurately religious confusion, in our household. My mother’s grandfather denied his Jewish background to assimilate, and both her parents dismissed religion. When she married, she adopted the Episcopal faith of her mother-in-law, whom she admired greatly, and seemed to find in it a sense of belonging.

While I was uninterested in the Bible stories of Sunday school, the quiet ritual of the service and the music appealed to me. Growing up, I was fortunate to have opportunities to travel, from national parks in the American West to a summer in Italy and Greece. Seeing the grandeur of these American landscapes and then the beauty and history of cathedrals and temples introduced something that I would consider spiritual: a stirring sense of awe and a recognition that there were forces at work I did not really understand but that were important.

Image: Later on, how did living on a Maine island affect your practice as an artist?

VR: Well, in winter there is no ferry, store, or post office, making it an exercise in self-reliance and adventure. Casco Bay was my first experience of living long term in such a remote area, and it was the beauty of the island that impressed me the most. With no access to a printing press, I painted. The landscape got my full attention, something I wanted to record directly. When I left the island nine years later, my feelings about the natural world had changed dramatically. Living there, it felt visceral, intense, the ocean often dangerous. My own size in this vast world was so much smaller, a humbling perspective I still value.

Image: If the island encouraged you to paint, did leaving push you in other directions?

VR: Coming back to the mainland, I returned to a new community, one that included other artists, something I had lived without for many years. It was stimulating to learn more about the work of others, and I felt a need to explore and experiment more with my own work. Representing only what I saw in front of me started to feel restrictive. The Skowhegan School opened me up to moving forward with this process. At the same time, I joined Peregrine Press, a cooperative press in Portland, and enjoyed getting back to printmaking and the experience of working with this community.

The next decade brought many changes, including testing the limits of abstraction in my work, recognizing the importance for me of some representation, and learning how to combine the two. It was a rich and productive time. As the direction of my work was getting more defined, I recognized that it was time for greater concentration of my ideas. The difficulty I had with printmaking was that getting the results I wanted was very time consuming. With painting, I could maintain the control I needed, and thus I made the decision to put printmaking aside and focus on painting again.

Image: You trained to work in health care, especially caring for patients who have undergone strokes or need long-term care for other reasons. I’m curious about how that experience has filtered into your work.

VR: I started in health care late, picking up on an early interest. Spending time in hospital settings, in rehabilitation and long-term care, I wanted to make images that addressed this work. It seems that illness often affects our mobility. To honor the patients I worked with, I did a series called Shift, in which a simple white pillow, a stand-in for my patients, is contrasted and combined with something that embodies movement, something that is denied with illness. It was a very personal series for me.

Image: What path took you from works like Shift into your more recent paintings?

VR: The move into my recent painting started in 2017, when I traveled overseas, something I hadn’t done in over fifty years. The University of Southern Maine sponsored travel programs in the book arts, and I signed up for several, going to southern France, Tuscany, and Acadia National Park and Monson in Maine. Each trip included plenty of sightseeing as well as concentrated time to create in an inspiring setting. It was the art and architecture we saw in Europe, combined with the natural beauty of our time in Maine, that started me on this recent group of paintings, Networks.

Image: In your latest series, you summon quite a range of images, often with deep theological roots, from diagrams of sefirot in kabbalah to the duomo in Florence. How do these images emerge for you?

VR: Getting older, I recognize that so much of the art that moves me has theological roots, from choral music to the spare spires of New England churches. Of all my travel, it was the trip to Florence that affected me the most. Seeing the Renaissance art and architecture there raised so many questions about the role of religious art, so much of it made during times of turmoil from wars, political strife, and plague. What was the purpose of telling visual stories in those contexts? My memories of the trip were dominated by the color crimson and gold leaf. A detail that stayed with me was how gold leaf was repeatedly used to communicate significance.

Image: As important as religious iconography is in this series, Maine itself also seems to provide an important symbolic lexicon.

VR: My experiences here in Maine, from my time on the island to my current garden in South Portland, have a deeply spiritual side. A bit like Emerson, I say that my garden is my church. A recent trip to Schoodic Point in Acadia took me full circle, back to my deep love of our Maine landscape. Getting home, I reflected on how these two seemingly different trips might relate to each other. The first painting I made was of a lichen with a gold-leaf halo on a red field. My thought was, “Is lichen less holy than Saint Peter?” Not only is the answer no, but today our recognition of the importance of nature is essential. This was the start of a series of paintings addressing the pressing problem of our time, climate change, which will not be solved until we acknowledge our dependence on and interconnection with nature.

Image: I’m reminded of Spinoza’s pantheistic phrase Deus sive Natura, which equates God with nature.

VR: Perhaps pantheism needs to be restored.

 

 

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