Arts and Entertainment

Anchorage artists Duke Russell and Ted Kim collaborate on paintings of futuristic fantasy

Though art has a long, strong tradition of collaboration, it's not common to find two artists collaborating on the same painting.

"Free Range Life," which opens Friday, March 13 at the Alaska Humanities Forum, is an exception. Ted Kim, known for black-and-white ink drawings, is supplying the design for nine pictures, and painter Duke Russell is following up with the colors -- or most of them.

Russell is a familiar name on the local arts scene. He has work at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, in the collection of the Anchorage Museum and other prominent venues. In the past 30 years, he's gone from upstart to something like an old master, a successful and recognizable member of Anchorage's creative establishment.

Kim is a more recent arrival, holding most of his shows in coffee shops, restaurants and other alternative venues. Yet he shares a lot of similarities with the older man.

Both can be considered "outsider" artists, forging their own way with styles and subjects that don't fit the formal professional categories of either realistic or impressionistic landscape or wildlife paintings, or any of the many modern and abstract genres. Neither has an art degree. A sense of whimsy is evident in the work of each. And both are prolific to the point of mania.

Their pictures often reflect a kind of improbable future mythology and have an illustrative thrust suggesting a story that lurks behind the image. Thirty years ago Russell caught our attention with observations on Anchorage life expressed in a format that borrowed from the non-conformist cartooning of the era, seen in popular images by R. Crumb and other out-of-the-mainstream illustrators. Kim's work updates that approach with stark, clean figures related to anime and illustrated novels. Both express the artists' critiques of society.

'Almost primitive'

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Originally from Texas, Russell moved to Anchorage in 1971 and tried his hand at everything from bicycle racing to running a band to creating a line of T-shirts. A multifaceted craftsman, he's made props for movies and commercials, including imitation ice for a soft drink ad.

Much of his art training came from working on sets for theater productions. The jobs taught him much about color, working fast and thinking big. In the 1990s he entered a design in a contest to paint the city buses. He was passed over in favor of a design he described as being "as generic as can be."

He called the contest a "joke," but was enthused by the idea. "The opportunity to paint a bus -- that is great!" he said.

It wasn't his only taste of rejection. He was turned down for a show at the now-defunct Visual Arts Center of Alaska. He wondered whether his work wasn't "too commercial" for the elites of the contemporary art venue. Yet one of the leaders in the local avant garde of the time, David Felker, praised Russell's "fresh, naive quality."

"It's almost animated," Felker said. "Almost primitive."

Today things are different. Russell has curated shows at the Anchorage Museum and received a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation. He has people with money buying his paintings and supports himself with his serious art -- although "serious" Russell images can also be pretty comical -- along with commercial assignments that interest him.

Like painting a bus, for instance. The opportunity presented itself again a few years ago when "Into the Wild," the film about wayfarer Chris McCandless, was filmed in Alaska. Russell was hired to create props, including a replica of the bus in which McCandless died.

Kim moved to Anchorage from Hawaii as a child. He was obsessed with skateboarding and began drawing in earnest after an accident put a cramp in his freestyling hopes. His meticulous and highly detailed pictures depict a universe where the human, animal, mechanical and natural merge in bizarre combinations. Goggled figures are often sensed to be traveling to an uncertain destination in some future universe.

"I hate to use the phrase 'post-apocalyptic,' " he told the Alaska Dispatch News while hanging a show at Middle Way Cafe in 2013. "But a lot of this takes place in a whole other society that happens after the present one has failed."

He described that show as a novel without words. "I've always been interested in the idea of a book that appeals to both adults and kids," he said.

He noted how his drawings resembled pages of a coloring book. "What would be cool is to have a coloring book that the adults could read and then the kids could color," he said.

Enter Russell.

The second step

"I could see in Ted's drawings a really rich fabric to paint onto," Russell said. "The detail, the psychology. They were like unwrapped puzzles."

"With black and white it's hard to delineate one object from another," said Kim. "Color brings out detail. It offers a lot of opportunity."

In August the two started working together using Kim's drawings as the starting point. Half of the pieces in the show are taken from work seen in previous shows, Kim said. The rest are new, though they maintain his established motifs -- peculiar pack animals, people, plants and machines, sometimes all combined into the same figure.

The originals tended to be small, more or less the size of a piece of typing paper. For their upcoming show, the team made enlarged copies then transferred pigment from the enlargement onto a roll of paper, a process that involved a squeegee and a lot of care.

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"It's not easy, but it's given us a perfect copy of the drawing," said Russell.

They wound up with something like a 36-inch-by-36-inch coloring book page that Russell could paint on -- staying between the lines, of course.

The result brought out definition in the myriad bits and pieces that make up the original image. But it also produced a sense of light, direction and dimension not found in the pen drawings.

Using paints that combine two different colors, the paintings took on a vibrant iridescence, a shiny, flat look that Russell likened to a "sort of an automotive finish."

In the past Russell has spoken of the loneliness of an artist's life as both a necessity and a blessing. "You do (art) for your own spiritual connection. It is an activity that yields great amounts of meditative qualities. It's just you and the your thing. That whole process is so peaceful."

But, he added, "When you're by yourself, you have to be the cheerleading crew."

Preparing "Free Range Life" has been a different experience. In announcing the show, he wrote of working through the process together, learning from each other "and having company while you paint. Not too shabby."

For Kim, the collaboration has brought an element of rediscovery. Notably, he has joined Russell in the painting part of the project.

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"I haven't painted since high school," he said. "It feels like the drawings were only the first step toward the paintings.

"This is a second step that I never anticipated."

FREE RANGE LIFE, work by Ted Kim and Duke Russell, will open with a reception at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, March 13, at the Alaska Humanities Forum, 161 E. First Ave., Door 15. It will remain on display through April 9.

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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