Presenting: Mother Heart, a brand new work of art by the talented Robert James Russell. I have fallen in love with Robert’s quirky, attention-grabbing drawings and water colors. I am especially drawn to his use of color and to how he combines humor with pathos, humanity with wild life and nature. His art never takes itself too seriously, but often touches on very deep themes. These are all things I aspire to in my own writing.
So I reached out to see if I might convince him to create a work based on a story that is particularly special to me, “Monstrous, Chaotic Things.” As I have written about here, the story was inspired by a dear friend and mother of five small children who died of ovarian cancer. It was published last August in CHEAP POP.
Robert and I talked about using the central image from the story, an osprey nest, as the focal point of his artwork. When I saw the final product, I was delighted that he had gently nestled a heart inside the chaos. How perfect! Hearts have appeared in so much of my fiction over the last couple years, from the girls with rheumatic heart fever in “La Rabida Heart Sanitarium, 1954” to the grandmother’s heart ticking inside the old clock in “Wheels and Bushings,” from the bare ventricles in “The Vibration Before the Sound” to the donated blood coursing through a mother’s heart upon first holding her baby in “Reclaimed Wood.” My own heart has also figured prominently in essays I have written, most recently “Top Ten Bits & Pieces of Ice.”
I was struck that Robert managed to weave so many of my stories together in a single drawing and also struck that I had written about so much heart! I hadn’t thought about the repetition of that theme until he crystallized it for me.
Collaborating with an artist has been an extremely enlightening and rewarding process, and I encourage you all to commission Robert to create a drawing for you. His rates are reasonable. He is flexible and supportive of your ideas and vision, while still bringing his own style, innovation, and personality to the work. I certainly hope I can entice him to do another piece for me next year.
For those of you who don’t know him, in addition to being a visual artist, Robert James Russell is the author of the novellas Mesilla (Dock Street Press) and Sea of Trees (Winter Goose Publishing), and the chapbook Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out (WhiskeyPaper Press). He is a founding editor of the literary journals Midwestern Gothic and CHEAP POP. You can find him online at robertjamesrussell.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @robhollywood. For COMMISSIONS (in any medium) or questions about the use of any art, please contact him at robertjamesrussell@gmail.com.
