Russ Potak

Artist Statement:
I paint in an expressionist manner using oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, panel and paper. I incorporate local and regional subjects of landscapes, various compositions and loose translations of things I encounter that happen to catch my interest.
Biography:
I have been an artist all of my life for as long as my memory guides me back to the crayon and pencil days of 1st grade and before. With me , it was never a choice thing. I have always produced art naturally as a means to communicate. I never considered it as anything that I decided to do. I have just always done it.

I officially studied art in high school, and followed up on that with four years as an art major in college. My Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting now hangs smugly in my studio, mostly as a reminder of all the jumping through hoops one has to do to obtain it.
Like I said, I had always done art, and didn't really believe a documented piece of paper was going to do much to affect my internal passion to keep doing art. It's a hard earned little piece of paper, compliments from the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, Massachusetts. (It didn't turn me into anything that I wasn't already,...it just gave me a sense of confirmation of purpose) ... and that's a good thing, ...I guess.
Since those days of the late sixties and early seventies, I have had many one person exhibitions, private openings for my art, participated in group showings, done countless commissions, both private and corporate, done some teaching workshops, been awarded some grants, and hung my work in just about every nook and cranny that would accommodate my paintings.

My work has been purchased by people of all walks of life and corporations of all sorts, in this country and across this country and across the big oceans to people in other lands. I've been featured in various news articles, magazines, and some reviews locally and elsewhere.

I live and create my art here in the beautiful Berkshires in Cheshire, Massachusetts, not far from where it all started with my first box of crayons.

My aim as an artist is to be honest with my work, and to say what I need to, the way that it best works on the canvas to communicate and express my visual concept.

Technique, is a product of that, not the other way around. Whether its a mood, a place, a composition, a feeling, or a story to be told, .....I say it like I have always said it,,, like I was speaking in paint.