CLEAR
SEEING
PLACE
studio visits
BRIAN RUTENBERG
New York City
Copyright © 2016 Brian Rutenberg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Permanent Green, New York City
www.brianrutenbergbooks.com
Edited and Designed by Girl Friday Productions
www.girlfridayproductions.com
Editorial: Richard Koss and Dara Kaye
Interior and Cover Design: Rachel Christenson
Cover Photograph: Spell 2, 2015, 82 x 60 inches, oil on linen.
Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York, NY
“There Is a Mountain” words & music by Donovan Leitch, ©1967 Donovan (Music) Ltd.
Used with permission.
Excerpt from the poem “Romantics” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller, Louisiana State University Press, lsupress.org.
Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9974423-0-4
eISBN: 978-0-9974423-1-1
First Edition
For the loves of my life, Katie, Olivia, and Christian
Contents
Introduction
1. Living
2. Wandering
3. Towering
4. Seeing
5. Working
6. Showing
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
—Donovan
Humidity made me a painter. I was born and raised in the mind-numbing heat of coastal South Carolina. My first art lessons were wandering the banks of ancient rivers like the Waccamaw, feeling warm pluff mud squirt between my toes as I ambled from one vantage point to another, desperate to contain the view for as long as possible. Most of the 624 Saturdays of my childhood were spent near water. Long before I knew what an artist was, I’d scoop up fistfuls of marsh mud, splat them on the dock under the savage Carolina sun, and carefully arrange torn bits of colored paper across the muck, followed by another handful of mud. The frond-lipped tip of an oyster shell was an ideal tool for skimming the translucent slime to reveal jeweled flashes of color of varying intensity. I did it again and again. Everything I needed was under my feet. It took decades to recognize how much the directness and simplicity of those experiences taught me about the way a painting comes into being. Paintings aren’t created; they’re made. Oil paint is crushed rock mixed with liquefied fat and smeared on cloth. All of the content sits on the tip of the brush because there isn’t room there for anything else. Painting enacts place.
This is not an instructional book, but a collection of thoughts, opinions, techniques, anecdotes, and personal observations spanning my days in the Lowcountry of South Carolina to my life as a full-time painter in New York City. I’ve also included a few trade secrets and bits of career advice because, as a magician friend once told me, if you want to keep something a secret, publish it.
Let’s begin with the single most important thing you need to be a painter: a locked door. Creativity thrives on solitude. Locking your door achieves two essential goals at once—it tells the world to stay out, and it confines you to a place where self-awareness, the enemy of art, can be rinsed away; it’s easier to fall in love with the sound of your voice while no one’s listening. The worst thing a painter can do is edit while working. Spill everything out behind your locked door and fix it later. The time will come when you can unlock it, but for now, paint for an audience of one. Remember, you’re not only the painting’s maker, but also its first looker. This book will go into detail about what to expect on both sides of your door. I’ll cover techniques to help you expand your vocabulary while it’s locked and give you an honest idea of what to expect when you open it to the world. The art world is a business, and, like any business, it thrives on consumption, crass as that sounds. However, our product is antispeed. We offer a world obsessed with velocity the gift of slow seeing and slow thinking, perhaps the most sublime gift one human being can offer another. We are dreamers. Our job is to glow in the dark, and the world needs more people who glow.
Since 2010, I’ve been producing a series of monthly YouTube videos called “Brian Rutenberg Studio Visits” to give working artists of all levels a glimpse into my painting life. Each episode is designed to make you feel as if you’ve walked into my studio, pulled up a paint-crusted chair, cracked open an icy beer, and talked about work. The videos are free of charge. My payments are the emails I get every day from painters around the world sharing their stories, struggles, and victories. They remind me that I am not alone. I wrote this book to tell you the same. You are not alone. Artists have always benefited from intimate gatherings to exchange ideas and techniques and lean on one another during tough times: Thomas Eakins had the Sketch Club, Vanessa Bell had the Bloomsbury Group, Jackson Pollock had the Cedar Tavern, and we have social media. The world is getting better and better for painters because of the Internet and social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, and we’ve only scratched the surface. Never has it been so easy to disseminate images to global audiences in seconds; however, as our awareness expands, there remains a hunger for the wondrous strange of the local. My videos are created in this spirit. Sometimes technology can solve the very problems it creates.
What I adore about YouTube is not watching people do mind-blowing things but knowing that anything is possible because there is always someone who can do it better. There is always room for improvement. I’ve watched countless hours of dimly lit painting demos that were as exciting as watching paint dry. None felt like an authentic one-on-one visit to a working artist’s studio; none had the qualities I craved, including decent production value, straightforward language, humor, and, most important, joy. Why do so many painters look as if they’re getting a flu shot when talking about their work? I can barely contain myself. Painting is fun. I have the best job on earth; my worst day is still better than a good day in most other jobs.
There have been many films, videos, and magazines shot in my studio, but they always look staged; I wanted something intimate and spontaneous. In early 2010, I set up recording equipment and made my first Studio Visit. It resembled a hostage video, but, after some fine-tuning with lights and angles, things improved. There are fifty-three episodes at the time of this writing, with content ranging from personal stories to ideas, materials, techniques, color mixing, and previews of new paintings, all rinsed in my love of art history. I didn’t learn to speak about painting from reading books but by visiting artists’ studios. A critic friend of mine agrees, noting that art criticism is different from other forms of criticism (e.g., food, film, theater, dance) because of the access accorded in a studio visit, a one-on-one encounter in the laboratory of the creator. My videos are an attempt to extend that intimacy to a broad audience through technology. This book is a companion to the videos. I’ve assembled the writings into six clear sections, each of which explores a primary part of my painting life. The message is simple: This is what I do and how I do it. I hope you find it useful.
LIVING
Empathy Is Gold
Art brings us back into ourselves by making us unrecognizable to ourselves; we see through someone else’s eyes, which broadens our experience and gives us empathy. Painting is the most empathetic art form because the viewer stands in the exact spot that the painter did as each skin of color was stacked ov
er time. A landscape by Paul Cézanne isn’t a statement but an invocation; it whispers, “Come closer, let’s twist nervous systems around one another and construct a place that wasn’t there before.” Will projecting our vitality onto something outside ourselves intensify our experience in the real world? You bet. I don’t want a painting to educate, shock, or enlighten me; I want it to rip out my nervous system and replace it with someone else’s. I want to look into what the poet Mary Oliver calls “The white fire of a great mystery.” I want to drop to my knees in musky earth with Jules Breton’s The Weeders, amble through curved space on red figure vases, and feel the stillness of Agnes Martin’s grids lilt across my shoulders like a worn T-shirt in summer. Painters don’t invite the viewer into a shared experience, they insist on it. Subject matter is information, and the treatment of it is what generates content. How do you see the world? Let us stare through your eyes. Show us everything, and don’t leave anything out.
In his book Hawthorne on Painting, Charles Hawthorne wrote, “Do still life because you cannot tell a story about it—paint something that isn’t anything until it is painted well. Get stuff that is supposed to be ugly, like a pie plate or an old tin basin, against a background that will bring out the beauty of the things you see. Then try to do it, trying to work for quality of color.” Subject matter is the delivery system for empathy. However, we don’t need to be born empathic. Art can teach it to us.
My father had empathy, always taking the side of the underdog and prompting me to consider things from other people’s perspectives. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, he gave up the dream of being a poet to attend Duke University and Fordham Law School like his father. After he married my movie- star-beautiful Albanian mother, they moved to the seaside resort town of Myrtle Beach, SC. Although he raised a family there, cofounded a successful law firm, and was one of the best-liked gentlemen in the state, my dad was a loner and an outsider. His poem “Bottom Lines,” written in 2010, is telling:
my life turned out to be
not what i dreamt it would be
but what i let it be
which
in my case
worked
In springtime, my parents, two younger brothers, and I piled into our station wagon and drove 661 miles from our house in Myrtle Beach to New York City to see my grandparents. We stopped halfway. Virginia was sweet in April, strawberries and pale pink dogwoods under pine trees towering over redbuds, honeysuckle, grape leaves, and wild roses. My father would get out of the car and wander alone into Civil War battlefields with grown-up names like Manassas and Cedar Creek. Then he’d drop to his knees and fill glass vials with the soil that had run slimy with the blood of teenage soldiers in battle only 113 years earlier. Each bottle would be labeled and displayed on a wooden railroad tie that served as a mantel over our fireplace. To him, Virginia was a landscape ripped in half, the geographical middle between North and South, bearing the scars of both. My father was Virginia: part Yankee, part Rebel, at home in neither.
Lonely souls possess the uncanny ability to recognize it in others, so my father naturally gravitated toward misfits. While most of his colleagues played golf at country clubs, he surf fished alone, wrote poetry in his office, and drank Michelob in a suit and tie with tobacco farmers in the back of the local bait shop. He told me that you can’t know someone until you’ve seen the world through their eyes and walked around in their shoes, a theme that runs through three of my favorite books: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Elephant Man and Other Reminisces by Sir Frederick Treves, and Death in the Grizzly Maze by Mike Lapinski. Every morning, I try to be kind to the first stranger I meet. Small acts of kindness—holding a door, smiling with eye contact, giving up a seat on the subway—pay off in larger ways because they open up possibilities for the rest of the day. Kindness is certainly better than the opposite. Human beings make art because we desperately need an excuse to stare at one another. By glimpsing into someone else’s heart, we gain a purchase on our own. Art is empathy, and it will save the world.
John Rutenberg. 1964.
Sandra Rutenberg. 1964.
It’s the artists of the world, the feelers and thinkers, who will ultimately save us, who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.
—Leonard Bernstein
Color
My first memory was blue. I was born on September 18, 1965, in Myrtle Beach, and in December of that year my parents took me by overnight train from Florence, SC (the closest station), to New York City. I remember staring at a blue nightlight in our sleeper car. My childhood was ablaze in color. As a toddler, I held my maternal grandfather’s finger as he led me around his huge backyard awash in pink azaleas every March. We didn’t have a lot to say (he couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak at all), but the flowers didn’t mind. Spero Michael Bogache was born in Albania and left his family behind to come through Ellis Island in 1920 with waves of immigrants seeking a better life; he had his first shave in America. How Pop-Pop loved his flowers. He guided my tiny hand across their petals and took us places words can’t go. Then I’d plunge my entire head into the blossoms and open my eyes wide to burn their raucous color into my retina.
I am the product of one place with two faces. Myrtle Beach is a resort town full of amusement parks and arcades buzzing with neon signs and blinking candy- colored lights, surrounded by some of the most ravishing formal gardens on the East Coast. There is transcendent beauty in the slow-moving water of Lowcountry rivers, but artificial landscapes rinsed in nickel and neon are equally as beautiful; when my family says, “Let’s get back to nature,” it means book a trip to Vegas. My love affair with Las Vegas is an extension of my affection for Myrtle Beach. Both are places in which nature and artifice crash head on into each other at breakneck speed, secreting a liquid that is bright and combustible. The fullness and amplitude of my resort upbringing gave me a deep love for excess; moderation simply isn’t in my vocabulary. As the South Carolina painter J. Bardin once told me, “Sometimes too much is just right.”
The term “Lowcountry” originally referred to the prehistoric seacoast, or Sandhills, of South Carolina, which spanned the width of the state from Aiken to Chesterfield counties. The Upcountry was everything above the Sandhills. Today, Lowcountry refers to coastal regions, from Georgetown to Beaufort, including sea islands like St. Helena, Edisto, Fripp, Kiawah, and Port Royal. The richness of place permeates the South Carolina Lowcountry and is woven inextricably into her history, folklore, and commerce. The Romantic painter Washington Allston was born in Georgetown, SC, forty minutes south of where I was raised. He wrote of how he “delighted in being terrified by the tales of witches and hags,” referring to the same tangled woods I explored as a kid. My college roommate was born and raised in McClellanville, a small shrimping village fifty minutes north of Charleston. One summer, he led me deep into the woods to visit his relatives in a nearby Gullah community, descendants of slaves who worked on the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. We drove down a dirt road to a dead end and then walked beside a river flowing black as typewriter ink; decaying tree trunks peeking from waterlogged shadows like gargoyles made the familiar appear alien. Cobalt-blue bottles tinkled in branches overhead, put there to ward off wooly boogers (hairy monsters that live deep in the Southern woods) who, attracted to the light refracting through the glass, became trapped and vaporized in the morning sun. Blue is thought to repel evil spirits, which is why porch ceilings down south are often painted the color of sky. I still think of those bottles when I use bright blue.
I use bright colors because they’re available. Twentieth-century hues like pthalo green, quinacridone magenta, and Hansa yellow have high tinting strength and can be quite intense. However, the key to using bright colors effectively is knowing how to use dull ones. Adding bright color is like turning a radio up a little at a time; you don’t realize how loud it is until you turn it down. Dull colors are like turning the radio down. I spent deca
des practicing with tertiaries, even studying the gray muck in the bottom of my paint thinner bucket because it feels like the gooey pluff mud that I marinated in for the first eighteen years of my life. Mud always fascinated me, and I whipped up mud pies better than any kid in school, but I never got the memo that you couldn’t eat them. Oil paint is just organized dirt, and I’ve tasted that too.
The Lowcountry wore softer palettes. My love affair with the color of oysters began at an early age. At low tide, their shells, delicate as pastry, cupped shallow puddles of salt water and pale mud. I’d lie on my stomach examining their color, just a breath of itself, and imagine swimming in their palm-sized oceans. Decades later, I realized this wasn’t the daydreaming of a child, but the mechanics of how a painter sees the world. Scale and logic evaporate, replaced by a new reality that is bright and capricious. There isn’t a color more beautiful than that of an oyster shell. Well, maybe that of a glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut.
My list of great colorists probably overlaps with yours (Fra Angelico, Pontormo, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Hans Hofmann, and Josef Albers), so I won’t focus on a stupid top-ten list. However, I learn just as much from lesser-known artists like Samuel Peploe, F.H. Varley, Karl Benjamin, Spencer Gore, Goodridge Roberts, Joseph Solman, Sonia Delaunay, and Bob Thompson. I never begin with a preconceived color plan but mix and juxtapose unexpected combinations right on the canvas until a family, usually three colors, starts to suggest a mood, much like Edwin Dickinson’s “color spots,” in which he would apply one tone next to another, gradually building color space. Through trial and error, I discovered certain color pairings that I stick with, such as purple/green, brown/blue, teal/orange, and red/gray. I keep several palettes going simultaneously and mix large amounts of one color in a range of tones on each palette. I also have one palette with small blobs of color arranged in the order of the spectrum. Plastic Chinese food containers are ideal for mixing.
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