Joseph Mason Russell

I was born at a young age on Waiheke Island, New Zealand. I was happy eating sand and looking for crabs under rocks until my father taught me to draw and paint, now I like doing that. Ever since then I have been scribbling pictures of people with big ears and noses onto any surface I can find. I lost my drive for a couple of years at 13 until one day I walked into my ‘hard tech’ teacher’s office and saw he had a bunch of my drawings taped on his wall that he had cut from worksheets that I had defaced. He explained these were his favourites and so I spent the next few years painting in a small, smelly laundry shed next to the beach. I mainly paint a mixture of people and places that I see in the streets and in dreams, sometimes gifting them to the subject met with mixed reactions. This is because I enjoy painting people how I see them and not necessarily how they would want to be painted. I like to show the wrinkles, blemishes and scars they have gathered as I believe these are beautiful and portray the true story of how someone has lived their life. I am now living and creating on Gadigal land in Redfern, Sydney.