In his foreword to The Illustrative Art of Lynn Paula Russell, the late Victor Arwas, founder of the pioneering London-based Arwas Gallery, wrote ‘Serious and dedicated as an artist, Russell is also a humorous, fun-loving introvert who, paradoxically, can transform herself into a grandiose exhibitionist. This little book reproduces a variety of her pictures, forages into a dark fantasy world of perfumed eroticism strictly regimented, clad and unclad, by strange rules and stranger images; look closely at them, for many of its heroines are the artist herself, projected into her own, and other people’s, often unavowed dreams.’

Most of Paula’s work reflects her personal journey of self-discovery in which her art intimately reflects, often in stark and painful detail, the experiences she needed in order to know at first hand the subjects that she illustrated. It was never enough merely to be interested or to use her considerable graphic skills to portray what she could imagine; she always needed to immerse herself in the explicit activities of whatever exploration or narrative she was concentrating on.

Rockscape, 2005

Paula grew up in a sheltered middle-class family in Whitstable, a small English town on the coast of Kent. As a child she was always interested in art, but her first loves were Ballet and appearing onstage in amateur pantomimes and dancing shows.

As a teenager she showed artistic talent and attended the Canterbury College of Art, which she left in 1969. In 1970 she went to London, where a friend in the profession helped her find an agent. For the next six years she was a professional actress, in repertory theatres, Regents Park Open Air Theatre, and for six months she performed in the first UK national tour of the musical Hair, where she experienced the wonderful freedom of appearing naked on stage. She also had small parts in several British television productions, including The Pallisers and David Copperfield (both in 1974) and The Cedar Tree (1976).

As her acting career was not as successful as she had hoped, in the late 1970s she turned to painting and illustration. Her first commission was to illustrate the 1977 children’s book Beyond the Midnight Mountains, written by her partner Frank Charles. She also painted portraits of actors, and designed calendars and posters. Some of her portraits created for the American television series Masterpiece Theater were reproduced on the cover pages of television magazines.

Having grown up in a rather repressed atmosphere, Paula experienced problems with her sexuality, which began to blight her relationships. When she was thirty she decided actively to fight her sexual inhibitions and do so openly, not secretly, because she felt this was hypocritical. Around 1980 she began posing for soft-core magazines.

In 1981 there was a further development. ‘I decided that I wanted to go further and appear in a sex video,’ she wrote. ‘I took the plunge and to my utter astonishment Paula Meadows was born. This new incarnation of me didn’t seem to resemble the earlier, rather timid version at all.’ She launched herself into a new career, exploring her fantasies to the full and losing all sense of shame connected to sex. And from this a torrent of erotic imagery was unleashed that led to an explosion of new creativity. ‘And of course, I met new people. I had already discovered my interest in the riding crop, the strap and the martinet when I had read The Story of O but now I found that I was not alone in my interest. There were those who lived that fantasy for real.’

Illustration from The Story of O, 1997

In 1982 Paula started working for the British magazine Janus, first as a model, then as an illustrator. Up until 1986 she created numerous fetish illustrations for Janus and continued to appear as a model. She recounted her memories of her time as a model and illustrator for Janus in The Janus Collection.

From 1984 to 1986 she appeared, as Paula Meadows, in several films in the United States, directed by Art Benn, Lasse Braun and Henri Pachard. In 1985 she lived in New York for six months, where she met the publisher of Screw, Al Goldstein, who interviewed her for his cable show Midnight Blue. On returning to the UK Paula began to appear in the British media. She was interviewed for magazines in connection with her erotic work, and participated in a few talk shows, one on Channel 4 called After Dark and another for British Satellite Broadcasting.

In the 1990s she turned to drawing erotic strip cartoons. The British comic artist Erich von Götha, who was already well-known in this genre, introduced her to a publisher in Paris, for whom she developed a story with the help of her husband. It was called Sophisticated Ladies, set in the 1920s. This was followed by Vacances d’été (Summer Holidays) and the two graphic novels Sabina and Sabina 2.

From 1989 to 1992 she edited and illustrated Fessée, a new spanking magazine, and from 1994 to 2004 edited and illustrated a sister magazine to Janus called Februs, for which she wrote regular editorial columns and occasionally modelled.

In the early 2000s three collections of her work were published by the London-based Erotic Print Society, a publishing house specialising in beautifully produced erotic art books. These were The Illustrative Art of Lynn Paula Russell, A Sexual Odyssey. and Painful Pleasures. She also illustrated Beatrice, and created another strip cartoon for EPS called The Young Governess. EPS also published two sex education books by David Delvin, for which Paula created the colour illustrations.

When Februs ceased publication in 2004, Paula decided to withdraw from the spanking scene both in private life and as an artist. Since then she has concentrated on commissioned work and painting. One of her projects is to design a new erotic tarot deck.

Russell’s illustration style is realistic, full of animation and facial expression, carefully-executed in pencil and ink. In her coloured works she paints with oils on paper or uses coloured pencils, as in a series of fantastic landscapes titled Bodyscapes, in which female bodies are seen as part of a landscape. Her first Bodyscapes were exhibited, with some success, in a gallery in the Pimlico district of London in 1988, and later in the Paris gallery Les Larmes d’Eros. Some of them are now available from Talisman Fine Art.

Paula’s personal website at www.lynnpaularussell.org is no longer live (though it can be accessed through the Wayback Machine site); however, there is a biography and some of her work for sale at the Talisman Fine Art website here.

In 2021 Paula generously agreed to be interviewed by honesterotica, so if you are interested in knowing more about her thoughts on life, art, and the nature and purpose of erotica, you will find her fascinating responses here, here, and here.

Similar artists

Giovanna Casotto – Italian comics artist of explicit erotic narrative, often autobiographical.
Caroline Coon – British painter of confessional sexual and political subjects.
Guido Crepax – Italian comics artist of literary-erotic comics, including Story of O.
Leonor Fini – Italian-Argentine-French surrealist of perfumed, ritualistic erotic fantasy.
Namio Harukawa – Japanese master of dominant-woman fetish ink drawings.
Dorothy Iannone – American painter of ecstatic, autobiographical narrative erotica.
Louis Malteste – French illustrator of clandestine flagellation and fetish material.
Milo Manara – Italian adult-comics artist of erotic adventure and literary subjects.
Georges Pichard – French adult-comics artist of erotic, fetishistic narrative.
Apollonia Saintclair – Contemporary illustrator of refined black-and-white erotic line work.
Erich von Götha – German-British illustrator of stylised contemporary BDSM strip cartoons.