HOUSTON'S CUSTOM FRAMING - Key Persons
Artist Russell Chatham works on a miniature landscape at his studio. Famous landscape artist Russell Chatham has returned to his Bay Area roots and is painting local scenes at a studio in Marshall, Calif., Tuesday May 3, 2011.
Custom designed Chatham frames, detail 2"Snowfall at the foot of the Absaroka mountains" (SOLD)"Snowfall at the foot the Absaroka mountains". (SOLD) Note: this represents a more basic framing design for Chatham's work.
Russell Chatham was born in San Francisco on October 27, 1939. He is the grandson of the great landscape painter Gottardo Piazzoni. In 1958 Chatham began exhibiting and since then has had something on the order of four hundred one man shows at museums, art centers, private galleries, schools, colleges and universities not only throughout the west in places like Sun Valley, Aspen, Santa Fe and Denver, but also in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His work has also been exhibited in Europe and the Orient. Chatham began printmaking in 1981, and is today regarded as one of the world's foremost lithographers.
Publications about Chatham include a catalogue called One Hundred Paintings, and another about his original lithographs called The Missouri Headwaters. Five new books are in production, scheduled for release in 2003. One is called Selected Lithographs, another is The Seasons, a survey of the large format canvasses, another is called The Intimate View, a review of the small acrylics and watercolors, another is strictly portraits, and finally, a book of the Marin County paintings done in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Chatham has been profiled in Esquire, Southwest Art, People, U.S. Art, Antiques and Fine Art, Architectural Digest, Smart, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Associated Press, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and Fresh Air, PBS, and CBS Sunday Morning.
Among Chatham's private collectors are authors Peter Matthiessen, the late Eudora Welty, P.J. O'Rourke, David Halberstam, Curt Gentry, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, William Hjortsberg, James Crumley, the late Richard Hugo, James Welch, Richard Ford, Rick Bass, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Carl Hiaasen, and the late Richard Brautigan; editors and publishers, Jann Wenner, the late Seymour Lawrence, Terry McDonell, and William Randolph Hearst, III; New York restaurateur Elaine Kaufman; cartoonists William Hamilton, Guindon, and the late B. Kliban; former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent; art critic Robert Hughes; media correspondents Tom Brokaw, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Van Gordon Sauter, and the late Charles Kuralt; entertainment personalities Michael Keaton, Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley, Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, the late Sam Peckinpah, the late Slim Pickens, Margot Kidder, Jeff Bridges, Peter and Jane Fonda, Sydney Pollack, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sean Connery, Harry Dean Stanton, Angelica Huston, Jimmy Buffet, Dave Grusin, Don Henley, Glenn Frye, Dennis and Randy Quaid, Meg Ryan, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Ali MacGraw, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and Harrison Ford.
His search for interesting images has taken all over California, the American West, and to remote regions of Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and Nepal.
From 1975 to 1979, Stephen McMillan worked at Graphic Arts Workshop in San Francisco. For most of the years from 1979 to 1992, he was an artist in residence at Kala Institute in Berkeley, where he taught classes in printmaking and wrote three technical articles about aquatint etching. In 1992 he moved to Petaluma, California, where he created scores of images of the landscape. In 2005 he moved his studio to Bellingham, Washington where he currently resides and works.