Russell Mills (artist)

Russell Mills is a British artist who was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, UK in 1952. He paints, creates multimedia installations, designs stage sets and lighting and has produced record covers and book covers for Brian Eno, the Cocteau Twins,Michael Nyman, David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, and Nine Inch Nails.

As a recording artist he has collaborated with many musicians, for example David Sylvian, Ian McCulloch and Peter Gabriel. He has released 3 CDs with his recording project Undark, one of them on the British ambient label Em:t Records. The last, Pearl + Umbra was released on Bella Union, to very respectable reviews.

He was Visiting Tutor (until 2012) at the Royal College of Art, Visiting Professor at the Glasgow School of Art and regularly lectures in universities in the UK and abroad.

While in art school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mills interpreted and illustrated the lyrics of Brian Eno's "vocal" albums (and side projects with 801, Cluster and others) as a capstone to his artistic training, in the manner of a final thesis. The collected illustrations were later published as a book, More Dark Than Shark, which has long been out of print and difficult to obtain.

The general style of the illustrations is a combination of pen and pencil sketching with pastels and watercolor paints used for coloration. Human figures, animals, and room interiors are frequently depicted, all of which are noticeably absent from later work. Elements of Mills' "collage" style begin to emerge with the incorporation of materials such as fabrics and metals into the drawn/painted work.

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