Valerie Russell was born in Orleans, Vermont in 1983. She received her BFA from the University of Vermont with a focus in painting, a practice she continues to nurture in her Burlington studio. Her work explores the intersection of abstract and figurative painting, celebrating and expanding the bounds of the natural world, through color, texture, and shape. Valerie’s gestural abstractions are grounded in the history of action painting and a desire to capture the experience of creating while demanding an interaction with the viewer. Russell is deeply curious about the fluid motion between conscious and unconscious, vacillating between intentional movements of the brush and visceral explorations of form and color.