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Comic Strips
In 1929 Patterson began illustrating Sunday newspaper magazine cover series for the Hearst chain. Among the series was "Runaway Ruth" (1929) and "Wings of Love" (1929–30). Each series ran for several months, and Patterson produced these on a semi-regular basis until 1933.
Patterson returned to the newspaper fold in the 1940s. He collaborated with Carolyn Wells on several series for the American Weekly Hearst Sunday magazine, all featuring the character Flossy Frills. From 1942-46 he produced a Sunday and daily panel cartoon series for Hearst's King Features Syndicate titled "Pin-Up Girls".
In 1951, Patterson created the cartoon Mamie, a Sunday page for United Feature Syndicate. Mamie was part of a revival of the glamorous "dumb blonde" in comics, in the movies and on the stage. The strip's beautiful lead was lovingly rendered, as was the New York City setting. Patterson added a panel of paper dolls to many of these Sunday comics. Maurice Horn called Mamiean "elegantly drawn, exquisitely composed page", but with "thin" humor, "a flapper strip that had somehow wandered into the wrong decade." Still, it ran until 1956 on the strength of Patterson's art and fashion-sense.
During the 1960s, arthritis began to limit his ability to draw. Patterson began mentoring younger artists as a faculty member of the National Institute of Art and Design.
Russell Patterson
Russell Patterson (December 26, 1893 – March 17, 1977) was a celebrated and prolific American cartoonist, illustrator and scenic designer. Patterson’s art deco magazine illustrations helped promote the idea of the 1920s and 1930s fashion style known as the flapper.
Patterson was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Although he claimed he knew at age 17 that he wanted to be a magazine cover artist, he took a circuitous route to his ultimate success in that field. His family left his hometown of Omaha and settled in Montreal when he was still a boy. He studied architecture briefly at college, then became an undistinguished cartoonist for some newspapers in Montreal, contributing Pierre et Pierrette to La Patrie. Rejected by the Canadian army at the start of World War I, he moved to Chicago to become a catalog illustrator.
A trip to Paris gave him the opportunity to paint and attend life-drawing classes. However, it also left him in debt, and so he reluctantly returned to the dull work of advertising art in Chicago.
From 1916 to 1919, he intermittently attended the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1922 to 1925, Patterson, as Charles N. Landon had done before, distributed a mail-order art instruction course. Consisting of 20 lessons, it was called "The Last Word in Humorous Illustrations" (despite the finality of that title, he also later contributed to the instruction books of the Art Instruction Schools).
In 1924, Patterson made an attempt to carve out a living as a fine artist. Traveling to the Southwest with his paintings, however, he found the art galleries indifferent to his work.
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