Cheryl Russell Verified listing

My work is about excavating worth from underneath everything the world piles on top of it. What’s buried under everything we were told we were.

I obscure things in my paintings — silhouettes, structures, secrets and bones. Like treasures hidden in plain sight. Never so hidden that the right viewer can’t find them — but hidden enough that finding them requires something: attention, patience, a willingness to stay. This is not a technique I developed. It is the way I have always seen the world — as a place where the most important things live just beneath the surface, visible only to those willing to look past the obvious. My paintings are built the same way I understand people to be built: layered, complex, and more fully themselves the longer you stay.

I make abstract expressionist paintings in acrylic on canvas — primarily large-scale structures built through instinct, risk, and trust. I don’t begin with fixed outcomes. I follow the painting as it develops, allowing forms and spaces to emerge, disappear, and re-emerge over time. My background in printmaking, collage, and drawing informs how I construct a surface, but painting is where all of it converges. The process is direct and responsive. The work shifts as its direction becomes clearer, and I follow it.

The people who connect with my work tend to stop in front of it, feel something they can’t immediately name, and realize later that the painting was saying something true about them. That recognition — not of the image, but of themselves — is what I’m after. The paintings don’t dictate meaning. They hold space for it. Viewers bring what they carry, and the work meets them there. When it lands, it creates something quieter than impact — a sense of being understood, or accompanied, without anything needing to be explained.

Human beings carry entire worlds within them.

I paint to reclaim—worth, agency, story—from underneath everything the world piles on top of them. My layered, complex work excavates the self beneath inherited narratives, asking viewers to slow down and look deeply. What they discover requires earned intimacy. For collectors reclaiming their own sovereignty.

Artist & Educator | BFA, Texas State University | Abstract expressionist painter, Silver Street Studios, Houston

Community | Board member, Visual Arts Alliance | Women's Caucus for Art | Women in the Visual and Literary Arts

Exhibition | National solo and group exhibition experience | Adam Elkhadem Foundation Grant recipient (solo show, October 2026) | Work in private collections across the US and Canada | Published in multiple publications including recent UK magazine features