His early work was influenced by the Italian metaphysical painters, and the surrealists, but became more concerned with geometry, perspective and perception in the 1950s and 60s. He made a number of paintings using the camera lucida.

 Moving to Italy in 1978 he studied the figure and began painting erotic works, exhibiting in the show 'Tentazioni' at the Forte Belvedere in Florence, and the ground-breaking 'Erotica 93' in Bologna.

 In 1995 he had a comprehensive retrospective of both geometrical and erotic works at the Erotic Art Museum in Hamburg, and subsequently another show at the Musée de l'Art Erotique in Paris. He has also shown at the Erotics Gallery in New York and has work in collections in many countries.

 In the 70s he was London correspondent for Arts magazine New York, and in 1982 wrote and illustrated the erotic novel 'Sophie's Dream Book.' This was followed by one of the world's first erotic pop-up books, 'The Secret Carnival' published in a limited edition in London in 1988.

 David Russell has also worked on erotic sculptures, principally in terracotta, and graphics published by Vittoria Pozzi, in Florence, Italy.

  La prima volta che vidi una mostra di Russell mi colpì la qualità della luce che emanava dalla sua pittura, come da una oscura cantina affollata di obese mcchine calcolatrici. In presenza di queste machine si è presi dalla paura. C'era, forse, un pericolo di melodrama a quel tempo. Adesso che nella oscura cantina entra un po' di sole, le machine sono divenute meno paurose, quasi animali od umane; il pensiero perde il suo terrore. È questa riconciliazione con più umani motive che l'ha redento. Ed anche se questa riconciliazione è effettuata innanzitutto attraverso le allusive figure della mitologia classica, essa non è per questo meno valida.

  Ma oramai è venuto il tempo di emergere all'aria aperta: I personaggi inanimate che compaiono nei paesaggi hanno una cristalina intense vitalità. Portare astratte forme a tale intensa di vita è una facoltà che Russell, nonostante le sue ingenue prospettive, ha appreso da Mondrian e Herbin. Mentre l'indovinare il prossimo stadio dello sviluppo di Russell è impossibile, possiamo già dire che egli ha dimostrato d'essere tra il meglio della giovane pittura inglese, ed il suo antiretorico trattamento dei temi, che alcuni hanno guardato come suscettibili d'esibizionismo istrionico, contiene la promessa di una ulteriore integrazione e una conciliazione con l'ambiente industriale che resta il sine qua non di una valida pittura del nostro tempo.

  David Russell is a master painter, who has turned the beam of his intense imagination through the shadowlands of thought and emotion. His insistence to brighten and clarify with scholarship and vision that which lives in perpetual cynical twilight in most of northern Europe and particularly in Great Britain has made him an exile. A position that he has learnt to relish and enjoy, often baiting the uninformed blinkered guardians of morality into his arena of Oxford trained debating skills.

  Russell's paintings of stillness, sexuality and dream are not fictions: we know them too well. They are chiming recollections, deep-seeded evocations that haunt and echo in the richness of our subconscious. The luminosity of these works vibrates sympathetically to a sunken pure vein of our knowledge. A gold line beneath the murky solidity of enforced guilt.

  Russell holds these for us in the permanence of his vision and its restless enquiry into new territories of visual narrative. The staggering volume of work produced to find an ideal. It has been impossible for him to nest in the safety of a single genre, or accept the static praise of a named pew of style. He is a connoisseur of the hidden, with an habitual need to share it, constantly seeking variation and evolution, each form of his work marked by the distinctive aroma of secrecy and dream: an intoxicating perfume to the curious.

  The early dark and layered paintings have grown outward, those distant chambers have lightened. Their interiors, so over-populated with absence and varnished with expectation, have unfolded, open to a race of sublime and potent beings, who now occupy and illuminate their space. There is an unnerving innocence in the clear-eyed eroticism of these meetings. The security of the studio nude is replaced by the undressed moment, poised before or after the intimate act of transmutation, held in a guiltless perspective that stretches back to Arcadia. These beings are born erect and equal, available and in joy of their freedom. Judaic/Christian morality has not stifled and bound the pleasure of their dreaming bodies. The taint of jealousy and violence is unknown, they glide from one celestial congress to another. The tableaux they inhabit also share their freedom, gravity and single perspective are to be ignored or re-invented in this world: these are stage sets drawn on the eve of remembering, a waking notation of a fabulous lost time. A sensual mapping of the engagement of life, the eros and being.

  Russell's humans are not stained by brutality and greed, they possess a classical detachment from base matter, a gift to our tired isolation, a Euclidian geometry of desire that smiles quietly allowing us to recognise the reflection beneath our memory.