Russell Everett: Featured ECAG Artist

Russell Everett

The images below are from Everett's Northwest Florida/South Alabama Billboard Series:

"When I was a child I was always fascinated by the badly drawn paintings of awkward red snappers, dolphins, and flounders depicted on the billboards that littered the two lane highways in north Florida and south Alabama. The Emerald Coast was beautiful, but the Redneck Riviera, various Panama City beaches, and certain Fort Walton Beaches were overwhelmed with ugly advertisements, meccas of bad taste, white-thrash havens, and aesthetically, dysfunctional roadside beaches."

Southern artist Russell Everett has served as a lecturer in the Art and Design Department at Troy University for the past ten years. Prior to his appointment as a Lecturer, he worked as an adjunct for several years at the main campus. He also worked as an adjunct at Troy Montgomery for the past fifteen years. While he teaches Visual Arts, Watercolor, and Sculpture at the main campus, his forte is Introductory Drawing. Two of Everett’s drawings were included in the Faculty Show, “Past and Present” at the new Troy International Arts Center. He will be featured in a one-person exhibition in July of 2018 at the Heritage Hall Museum in Talladega. The exhibition will include both old and new drawings.

Many of Everett’s new drawings concern the imagery of tattoos and the importance many of his students feel about their ‘inked’ decorations. Russell has always been fascinated by tattoos…..so exotic and surreal. He was excited by the tattoos owned by his various uncles (ex-sailors) and other relatives. While attending Auburn, he learned more about traditional drawing, but he always remembered tattoos: the creations of dark, positive images on a moving and changing ground. According to Everett, “these images are all over the top and are not meant to degrade or glorify a certain type of Southerner or their kinfolks from the past. To paraphrase Faulkner, “the past is not even past.”

After receiving his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees he held many various teaching jobs starting in Ozark, Alabama as an Artist in Residence in the public schools. He has worked with the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts as a drawing and watercolor instructor and as a juror and demonstrator at various Fountain City Arts Festivals in Prattville, Alabama.   He served as an Artist In Residence at AIDB for four years, as an Artist In Schools in the Talladega School System, and he worked for a year as an assistant with the Heritage Hall Museum. Everett has also served as a painting instructor with the Summer Art Camps (Kelley’s Kids) in Talladega for five years.

Everett has exhibited in more than forty art competitions and invitational exhibitions over the past decade and his work can be found in various museums and universities, including the Huntsville Museum of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Northwest Florida State College in Niceville, Florida, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, Auburn University Montgomery (Nursing School), Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, SAMC Foundation in Dothan, Alabama, Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, Trenton State College in Trenton, New Jersey, and Heritage Hall Museum in Talladega, Alabama, and the Alabama State Council for the Arts in Montgomery, Alabama.

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