Russell Mills (artist)

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Russell Mills is a British artist who was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, UK in 1952. He paints, creates multimedia installations, designs stage sets and lighting and has produced record covers and book covers for Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, and Nine Inch Nails.

As a recording artist he has collaborated with many musicians, for example David Sylvian, Ian McCulloch and Peter Gabriel. He has released 2 CDs with his recording project Undark, one of them on the British ambient label Em:t Records.

He is Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, Visiting Professor at the Glasgow School of Art and regularly lectures in universities in the UK and abroad.

Contents

[edit] Early work

While in art school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mills interpreted and illustrated the lyrics of Brian Eno's "vocal" albums (and side projects with 801, Cluster and others) as a capstone to his artistic training, in the manner of a final thesis. The collected illustrations were later published as a book, More Dark Than Shark, which has long been out of print and difficult to obtain.

The general style of the illustrations is a combination of pen and pencil sketching with pastels and watercolor paints used for coloration. Human figures, animals, and room interiors are frequently depicted, all of which are noticeably absent from later work. Elements of Mills' "collage" style begin to emerge with the incorporation of materials such as fabrics and metals into the drawn/painted work.

[edit] Emergence as music packaging designer

In the 1980s, Russell Mills began receiving commissions to design record album covers and associated packaging. Stylistically, his work at this time became much more abstract, abandoning figurative representation in favor of symbolic allusions. He regularly treated the canvas as a sculptural plane, with organic materials such as metals, powders, bones, feathers, beeswax, fabric, wires, animal skins and papers embedded in thick paints and pastes. Works of this period generally occupy the entirety of the canvas with little or no "negative space" left.

Notable album covers in the 1980s include:

An analysis of the symbolic meaning of the elements used to create the cover for Roger Eno's Between Tides appears in the 1999 book 100 Best Album Covers, edited by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell (of the design group Hipgnosis.)

[edit] The beauty of decay

Russell Mills is arguably most widely known for his work with Nine Inch Nails in 1994. He was commissioned to create the entire visual world of The Downward Spiral, beginning with the artwork for that album's cover and booklet, and extending to all of the associated singles (including March of the Pigs and Closer to God), the remix collection Further Down the Spiral, and various promotional materials.

These interrelated works contain Mills' heaviest use of organic materials to depict a sense of fragility and decay. Animal skeletons, sets of teeth, blood, feathers, and dead insects are liberally embedded in the canvases. In some pieces, materials have been affixed and then exposed to water or chemical elements, so that their decay is literally imprinted on the surface of the artwork.

In the second half of the 1990s, Mills moved on from this style, revisiting it primarily for related Nine Inch Nails releases (the 1997 videocassette compilation Closure, and the 2004 DualDisc re-release of The Downward Spiral, which was accompanied by several new Mills compositions downloadable from Nine Inch Nails' website).

[edit] Advent of digital design

From the later 1990s to the present, Mills' work has again evolved to a new style, made possible by the advent of computer design applications such as PhotoShop. The "collage" aesthetic is still frequently seen, but now in a virtual/digital form, with many abutting and overlapping semi-transparent images, often cropped into crisp, aligned rectangles.

Mills still uses hand-drawn or -painted imagery, but as often as not it is scanned into the computer and treated as another malleable collage element. Images of water and sky are frequently seen, and a cooler color palette often prevails (in contrast to an earlier reliance on earth tones).

Negative space is still a rarity in Mills' compositions. It is worth noting that many of the musicians who choose Mills as an illustrator compose music that is "ambient" to varying degrees. Many of the album covers visually reflect this, in that they can be viewed quickly for an overall emotional impression, while intense perusal reveals many painstakingly layered details.

Notable album covers from 1995 to the present include:

[edit] Mills as musician

In addition to soundtracking several multimedia exhibits (see below), Russell Mills has released two albums to date:

  • Russell Mills : Undark (1996) (re-released in 2000 as "Undark One: Strange Familiar")
  • Russell Mills / Undark : Pearl + Umbra (1999) (rereleased in 2000 as "Undark Two: Pearl + Umbra")

Both albums originated from Mills "collecting sounds" from musicians, many of whose albums he has illustrated. He then collaged the organic and electronic sounds into ambient pieces (with one or two vocal "songs" per album), with varying degrees of collaboration with the originating artists.

Featured contibutors to Undark (aka "Undark One: Strange Familiar"):

Featured contributors to Pearl + Umbra:

[edit] Multimedia soundtracks

  • Measured in Shadows (1995, with Ian Walton & Big Block 454)
  • Republic of Thorns (2001, with Ian Walton & Paul Farley)
  • Cleave / Soft Bullets (2002, with Mike Fearon)

[edit] External links

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