Oil on tablet
25cm x 25cm
2006

From a series of nine tablets.

Excerpt from essay
by Suzanne Moore
Award-winning Writer /Columnist from Elle to
The London Review of Books, Columnist for
The Guardian and The Mail on Sunday

HOW DOES ONE INCORPORATE CANCER?
Russell is striking in his detachment, self-observation
and also his idiosyncratic choice of imagery wasnow
2006 (cat. 39), his lack of interest in other people’s
‘metaphors’ is powerful. He seeks to draw, paint
and map his own way through his illness, whether it
be jumping over ‘the mortality box’, hindsight 2004
(cat. 10) or painting himself, you look well 2005
(cat. 18) unblinkingly bloated with steroids. But how
invisible is the cancer experience? In popular literary
terms it is everywhere. The writer, Dina Rabinovitch,
who has breast cancer, was told by a publisher recently
“the cancer memoir is a crowded market”. We are
now flooded with the cheery cancer memoir. As the
journalist, Jan Moir has commented, Ruth Picardie’s
‘Before I say Goodbye’ and John Diamond’s ‘C. Because
Cowards Get Cancer Too’, became the “the mummy
and daddy of the modern genre”. Oncologists note that
many patients want their information presented less
“funnily”. Such books are “as notable for what they
don’t say as well as what they do”.