Excerpts from various art reviews.

Artist approaches painting with directness
© Gordon Ligocki, Times Correspondent, The Times Art Section (newspaper)

There is straight-on boldness of execution in the work of Russell Maddick, current featured artist at R.H. Love Modern Gallery...

The color, the form and the movement suggest a genuinely curious individual following out his own visual thoughts. His solutions are not simple; his art is not “lite.”

Most conspicuous is his constant sense of movement. Working wet-on-wet in some areas, the painter somethimes loses portions of one confident brushstroke into the still wet undercolor.

His painting surface ranges from pure transparent glazes to a thicker, impasto calligraphy. Such surfaces don’t often offer the eye a resting place. They instead push the eye and mind of the viewer on to the adjacent geometric fragments.

In so fragmenting the painting surface into geometric segments, he utilizes few flat color areas. He further violates those edges by letting fluid organic brushwork spill over to the next area.

The artist self-describes his paintings as “metaphors for movement,” particularly emphasizing geological shifts and neutron bombardment...

...To Maddick’s credit, he often makes these color/shape/texture shifts in quick, rude jumps rather than gentle transistions that politely wait for the viewer to catch up.

His movement combined with unorthodox tone/color relationships makes each canvas a genuine visual journey.

Given a longer time frame to live with the pieces, one would most likely find the surfaces yielding further visual surprises...

Four-star show divided by five
© Helen Cullinan, Art Critic, The Plain Dealer (newspaer)

...Maddick, also on the Youngstown State University art faculy, is an expressionistic and compulsively decorative painter who doubles as a sculptor of thick plywood painted figurative cut-outs. His oil-on-canvas paintings are wildly colorful flattened tabletop “Votive Fruits,” and “Morning Sunrise,” in which figures rise in the foreground of a fiery volcano...

Russ Maddick solo exhibition is a display of abstractionist art
© Clyde Singer, The Vindicator (newspaper)

Russ Maddick, an aggressive abstractionist of long standing, is being rewarded with another well-earned solo show at the Butler Institute of American Art...

...There's an awkward grace about Maddick's vigorous expressionist endeavors but colors are usually brilliantly warm. His work has the artistic appeal to entice others to take notice...

...Outstanding in his current showing is “Cross Current,” a large work constructed of thick, heavily textured and harmoniously colored layers of hand-made paper. It appears as a prime example combining design, texture and colors, well alienated from any suggestion of a possible life or nature itself is solely in its rendition.

The same may be said for the other works shown. Maddick's paintings are consistent in personal bravura with every little inventive shape occupying its proper place in the overall design. In no uncertain words he makes his own statement: “All along I’ve rejected slickness. That for me is a dead end. I want the work, in fact, to verge on being inept—yet is not. That’s when you’re reaching for new territory.”...

Vivid individuality rules 7 exhibitors’ perceptions
© Tracey C. Hummer, Columbus Dispatch (newspaper)

...An unusual method and strong design sense create the visual strength in the collage of Russell Maddick. This professor of art at Youngstown State University creates fluid, lenear color studies that have the appearance of monoprints.

Maddick creates the fuel for his collage by dragging paint mixed with gel across the paper with a palette knife so it bleeds into the paper and leaves a loose pattern of lines.

“Edlin,” the strongest of the three works on view, resembles a more painterly Matisse cutout with its jagged shapes and brilliant color...

At Butler, Valley artists explore new media, methods
© Clyde Singer, The Vindicator (newspaper)

...Opening today at the Butler in Youngstown is a fine tandem show of works by two Youngstown State University Professors of Art—Russell Maddick and Michael Moseley—who are known nationwide for years of the finest visual arts production. Exploring entirely different media and methods, these two delve deeply into the intricacles of abstraction. Experimental in form, sympathetic to the tradtions of geometric design, and sensitive to the elements found in natural world, the worlds of Maddick and Moseley are challenging and dramatic. Exhibited together, the works of these artists offer an intriguing dynamic synergy that makes this exhibition a real visual pleasure.

Butler Director Lou Zona, “We in the Youngstown area are blessed to have such an extraordinary pool of artistic talent right at our front door. Russ Maddick and Mike Moseley represent the high level of accomplishment here—both artists who have received national acclaim.

The current two-person show presents a great contrast between painter and sculptor but it shows that both share a thorough understanding of how it can touch us.”