"My father said being an artist is the shortest road to the poor house , claiming "real" work is something you don't like. I ignored him through oppositional behavior, later reasoning that only an idiot sets out to find the poor house, not to mention devote himself to something he does not love. Instead, I discovered an interesting back road to the unknown, and deliberately without a safety net."
― Russell Chatham
Russell Chatham (San Francisco, 1938) was an American Tonalist, landscape artist who spent most of his career living in Livingston, Montana. He is the grandson of landscape painter Gottardo Piazzoni, though he is essentially a self-taught artist. His work has been exhibited in over 400 one man shows in museums and galleries over his career of five decades with an extensive collector base.
Chatham's work eschews the narrative tendency of much western art and presents landscapes that stand in intimate relationship towards the human figure even in the absence of it. In the early 1980's Chatham began making lithographs and now stands as one of the world's foremost practitioners of that craft.
Chatham's lithographs have little to do with modern process lithography, which typically start with a photograph and uses 4 colors. His art lithographs have up to 40 different layers of color, all of which were hand drawn on the printing plate, and the colors selected for final effect. To see some of the early proofs of these prints is to see a study in vivid and unusual colors from which it is almost impossible to conceive of the final subtle shadings and quiet colors.
In addition to Lithography, Chatham also produced original oil paintings although he preferred printing lithographs as the more challenging art form.
In 2011, Chatham moved from Livingston back to California. He had a studio in Point Reyes, California and created until the very end of his life. Russell David Chatham passed away with his family in California November 10, 2019.
