Sam Russell - Illustrator

Boston, USA

Sam Russell is a multi-media artist and writer whose work is influenced by low-budget garbage cinema, snack cakes, and Britney Spears. They work at a coffee shop. 

“I was born to punk parents and an eccentric family who got me into animation like The Point! and the original, gorily-illustrated versions of fairy tales as a kid, and who really encouraged me to draw, which I’ve been doing since I was 3.I got into horror as I got older, and found I also liked to write scripts and poetry. As an unathletic, weird, lower-income Catholic school kid, I didn’t have many friends and any punk scene with kids in it had really dwindled in my hometown Worcester by the time I was show-going age, so I kinda had to be my own punk scene. I did some digging and found cult movies like Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Repo Man, and the underground comix of artists like Robert Crumb and Debbie Drechsler. When I moved to Boston and experienced art school, I realized just how shitty the mainstream art world is as well as how much of a need there is to keep art accessible and unpretentious. I want the characters in my drawings to show that adulthood, existence, and punk don’t have to be ugly all the time: they can be cute, colorful, and disgustingly entertaining, sort of disrupting the traditional bleak black and white aesthetics of punk art. There’s humor in almost everything in our lives no matter how dark they get.”