The grandson of renowned landscape painter and muralist Gottardo Piazzoni, Russell Chatham was born in San Francisco in 1939. As a child after the second World War, Chatham lived on a family ranch surrounded by the rugged environs of Carmel Valley and later in Marin County, both of which had a direct impact on his perception of the world. When he was eight years old, his aunt and uncle (who were also painters) gifted him a sketch box, marking his first experiments into plein air painting, which were quickly followed by early developments in art.
A self-taught artist, Chatham was widely known for Western landscapes that are based on memory and experiential sensation rather than plein-air observation. He would often visit the sites of his oil paintings, jotting down notes about the light, weather, and atmosphere that day in order to have details to draw from in his studio. Chatham was particularly interested in the various effects that light had on the tones reflected by the earth, sky, and trees. He launched his professional artistic career in 1958 with his first solo exhibition. Over the course of the next fifty years, he would go on to participate in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions, often with a waiting list for commissions from institutions and collectors. During his lifetime, he was also considered one of the leading lithographers in the world after taking up the medium in the 1980s.
Chatham lived in the small town of Livingston, Montana for most of his artistic career, spending several decades near the region’s dramatic mountains until he returned to a coastal town in Marin County in 2011. He died in 2019 at the age of 80.
