About Russell Chatham

Russell Chatham was a contemporary American landscape artist and author who spent most of his career living in Livingston, Montana. The artist is the grandson of landscape painter Gottardo Piazzoni, though he is essentially a self-taught artist. His work has been exhibited in over 400 one man shows and in museums and galleries over the last five decades. Notable art critic Robert Hughes is numbered one of Chatham’s collectors and there are others as diverse as Paul Allen and actor Jack Nicholson.   Chatham’s work eschews the narrative tendency of much western art and presents landscapes that stand in intimate relationship towards the human figure even in the absence of it. In the early 1980s Chatham began making lithographs and now stands as one of the world’s foremost practitioners of that craft.

In addition to Lithography, Chatham also produced original oil paintings. But according to his dealers, he preferred printing lithographs as the more challenging art form.  Despite being a print, Chatham’s lithographs have little to do with modern process lithography, which always starts from a photograph and typically only uses 4 colors. His art lithographs may have 30 or 40 different layers of color, all of which must be hand drawn on to the printing plate, and the colors selected for the final effect. To see some of the early proofs of one of his prints is to see a study in vivid and unusual colors from which it is almost impossible to conceive of the final subtle shadings and quiet colors.

In 2011, Chatham moved from Livingston back to California. His final studio was in in Marshall, California.