Deborah Russell was born and raised in the Western Districts of Victoria.

She studied printmaking at R.M.I.T., in Melbourne, Australia, and then worked in Paris, and later in London as an illustrator and cartoonist for a variety of magazines.

After her return from England in the early 1980s she painted street murals in Sydney and Melbourne and began exhibiting her work in over 25 individual and 20 group shows.

Since 1993 she has lived and painted in St. Andrews on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Her work is represented in –

The Australian National Gallery, Canberra

BP Collection, Melbourne

I.B.M. Collection, Perth

Monash University Collection, Melbourne

Myer Collection, Melbourne

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Robert Holmes a Court Collection, Perth

National Bank Collection, Melbourne

Reg Grundy Collection, Los Angeles

V.R.C. Collection, Melbourne

Western Mining Collection, Melbourne

Melbourne Club Collection

‘This land of ours is so unbelievably vast. We cling to it without the intimacy Europeans have with their land. Iconography is one way of bringing the land and people closer together.’

– Deborah Russell

What others have said:

‘The stylized attention to every rock, leaf and vein pushes her images into an almost surreal world of picturesque silences.’

– Robert Rooney, ‘Weekend Australian’

‘Underneath her never sentimental work is enormous discipline, talent and control. The places she creates are made with the intention of discovering reality. Her works are ultimately objects fit for contemplation.’

- Sharon Gray, ‘The Age’

‘There is an other world like tranquility to Russell’s work, an implied double meaning and narrative built up by painstaking layers of paint, balancing shapes, forms, colour and texture, to create a sense of planned mystery.’

– Joanna Mendelsson, ‘Times On Sunday.

‘Since the mid-1980s Deborah Russell has roamed about in the heart of the Australian countryside and produced paintings of cultivated fields and gardens, flowers, animals, trees, sea, sky, bushland and the umbilical thread of history and culture that binds our earthly existence. Her works beguile with their simple, beautiful forms and suggest that the miraculous may still be possible through the regenerative powers of nature and human intent.’

- ‘Fine Art Press.

‘Natural history has been the central preoccupation of Deborah Russell’s art since the early 1980s. Acknowledging a contradiction in her preferences for English gardens and love of the Australian bush, her 1980s paintings subverted European genres of still life and landscape. Vaguely surrealist in intent, they also revived a traditionally feminine aesthetic, recalling the flower paintings of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe.’

– Helen McDonald, ‘The Age’ 7/3/2009

‘Russell’s paintings are so finely wrought that you are drawn into their mystery. Their beauty is endlessly engaging, infusing the space that contains them.’

– Kim Lynch, ‘The St. Andrews Institute Review’