Elsie Russel

Biography

Born in 1956 in Nevers, France of French and American painter parents, mother Andree Descharnes, Beaux Arts trained classical still life painter, father Alfred Russell, professor of art and abstract expressionist "The Club" member - who rebelled and later became a figurative painter of Hellenistic Hells, chaotic falling figures interacting with Euclidean solids in landscapes based on the topologies of black holes and existentialist limbos.

Elsie was raised and schooled in America, France, Spain and Italy and vowed in the sacred groves of Diana to become an artist while living in Italy on the shores of Lake Nemi. This was at a time when art and god were quite dead and the myths, mere shadows. Finding neither instruction nor understanding, but only ridicule and cynical prejudice, Elsie embarked on a course of self- study, learning the way of the old masters through deduction and observation and researching the beliefs of pre-Christian cultures, whom she believes were right all along. She was encouraged by her parents who were both master artists and enlightened philosophically and by Salvador Dali, a good friend of her family's.

Elsie Russell is one half of the art/activist collaborative, IdEAL ORDER and with her spouse Jeff Harrington have employed techniques including telepathy, graffiti art and mail art in their joint anarchist work.

From Elsie:

 
     "My husband's great-great-great-great ('bout a thousand more greats) 
   grandfather Harrington wrote the utopian novel - Oceania!"
   He told me the book was written in the 1600s.