Clear Seeing Place

by Brian Rutenberg

  Although I painted in acrylics early in my career, I am an oil painter. Oil colors are transparent, semitransparent, or opaque. Transparents such as alizarin crimson or pthalo green are fat (high oil content), while opaques like cadmium red or cerulean blue are lean (low oil content). Titanium white is opaque and is the whitest white, while zinc white is semitransparent and good for glazing. Black is a highly versatile color, and I am always suspicious of teachers who advise against using it. Diego Velázquez used black—end of discussion. I prefer ivory black (semitransparent) and mars black (opaque), both of which have warm tints perfect for dirtying other colors. Mars black mixed with alizarin crimson makes a black cherry color and, when mixed with lemon yellow, produces a gorgeous dull green.

  At first glance my paintings appear to have every color imaginable. The human eye can detect more than seven million variations, but the more you look you will see that they operate chromatically within a small orbit of a few carefully chosen hues. It’s never about individual colors but how they vibrate together: purple appears more intense when placed near yellow or green. Vincent van Gogh kept a red Chinese lacquered box on his worktable in which he stored balls of colored yarn that were woven in multiple combinations to help him visualize what brushstrokes might look like on a canvas. His pal Émile Bernard noted their “unexpected interlacing tonalities” in which colors in combination produced greater effect than individually. A good place to experiment with color juxtapositions is in the house paint section of your local hardware store. Try moving the little color sample swatches around in various combinations—just don’t get caught.

  The key to color is to try everything without scrutiny. Just play. You can’t think color; you have to see it. I’ve never taken a color theory class in my life but rely on direct observation and practice. Color is communication. It can stir our deepest emotions, create a sense of spaciousness, and momentarily distract us from the unstoppable advance of time with sheer visual delight. However, you don’t learn color from books; you have to monkey around with it on your palette, put a blob next to another blob, and see how they look together. Work across the image rather than on top of it. In other words, don’t labor over parts, but work the whole field; if you put a dab of cobalt blue in one spot, move it to the opposite side swiftly, without analysis. Do, then think.

  The director Arthur Penn said that every day on set he made one decision that changed the entire film. He just didn’t know which one. By doing first and thinking second, I have assembled an unusual and personal palette. Some combinations work and others fail, but all it takes is one good decision and the entire painting hums. The secret is to pay attention.

  Paying Attention

  Every spring during childhood, my mother placed a crystal bowl of water on my bedside table in which floated three pink camellia blossoms cut from a bush in our front yard. At night, I’d lie on my pillow, watching them slowly spin and bump into each other until my eyelids betrayed me. They would still be spinning when I awoke. Looking is gathering information, but seeing is contemplation. My mother was teaching me how to see. She created the conditions for an experience that had no intrinsic meaning whatsoever, yet it filled me with a rage to live.

  There is too much focus on meaning in contemporary art; people want to know what it means. They need to understand. This desire to know is logical if you’re reading a pill bottle, but painting is seldom logical. Seeing a painting takes patience and the willingness to perceive differently. It restacks our priorities in unexpected ways and entices us to notice that which we overlooked. When a painter does their job well, the richness of content supplants the requirement for meaning. Van Gogh painted a pair of old shoes on a table, but we don’t need to know what he meant to access acres of rich content because of how he painted them. Everything we need is compressed into each ropey brushstroke. All that’s required is our full presence.

  I love the fact that a painting is an object made solely to be seen, enabling us to unbuckle from linear thought and drift. However, drifting implies moving away from something. What is my something? If you had asked me to define my work as either abstraction or representation thirty years ago, I’d have barked out the former. Now I’m not so sure. I am not an abstract artist. What does that even mean? I am a landscape painter who constructs images by abstracting from the visible world. Abstraction is a process, not a style. Saying you’re painting abstracts is like saying you’re eating cooking: it doesn’t mean anything. To abstract means to remove, which implies it must be removed from something. I no longer believe that a painting can be about paint. Philip Guston was right: “Painting is impure.” He goes on, “We are image-makers and image-ridden.” What get promoted as abstracts in many galleries are actually representational paintings of abstraction, pushing paint around in a manner that looks like art, usually someone else’s. What are you abstracting from? My paintings must extend from real things; otherwise they look too much like art. It’s fashionable to claim that your work is open to interpretation or that it can be about whatever the viewer wants, but that’s marketing horseshit. What are you communicating? Sure, painting realistic water droplets on a chicken is impressive, but that’s not art. Some painters have a voice and lousy technique, while others have astounding facility but no soul; they’re just taking victory laps. Those who possess both have molten lava. Be yourself—the rest is just constant practice.

  When I Knew

  On my sixth birthday, my parents drove me one hundred miles south to Charleston to have my portrait done by Alicia Rhett, a well-known pastel artist who did some acting on the side; she played opposite Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Wilkes’s sister India in a little film called Gone with the Wind. For several consecutive Saturdays, I sat on a licorice-black stool in the parlor of her antebellum carriage house, which smelled of furniture polish and soup. The sound of pastel on cream Fabriano Tiziano paper lulled me into a trance. I paid attention and asked questions. On the right side of her easel was an antique table bearing the tools of work: stumps in porcelain teacups, pale chamoise skins, blending tortillions, and battalions of pastels lined up as neatly as a diamondback’s markings. What kind of job was this? I wondered. My father sat in a room full of law books; his father sat in the same room in a different zip code. What is an artist’s job? For the first time, I realized there was a subspecies of human beings who roamed the earth able to see that which was hidden in plain sight. I sensed the comforting murmur of family—not that of my parents and brothers, but a subtler music. Being an artist is familial.

  I watched as she transformed a few crumbs of cobalt blue into my right eye, as blue as the real thing, even more so. Instinctively, I reached out my finger and smeared the iris that had taken days to craft. She must have wanted to hit me with a polo mallet, but I’ll never forget what she said:

  “You’re going to be an artist, Brian. I’m certain of it.”

  Pastel portrait by Alicia Rhett. 1971.

  The best picture makes us say, I am a painter also.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  . . . And It’s Deep, Too

  Myrtle Beach offered little exposure to the fine arts. The art section at Booksmith, our only bookstore, offered two choices: a book on garden gnomes and a collection of perforated stencils for shaving designs into your pubic hair called Naughty Notions. I could only afford one.

  With my new collection of stencils, I retired to the privacy of our bathroom and carved a yin-yang into my pale fifteen-year-old bush with my father’s Gillette razor; it looked as if I’d been mauled by a puma. Still hungry (and itchy), I discovered the art history section in the public library and devoured it shelf by shelf. My favorite book was a full-color collection of the sea battle paintings of Édouard Manet. Much of what I know about suggesting volume and space in painting comes from that book. Despite filling dozens of watercolor pads with weak imitations, I still couldn’t understand how Manet got such elastic space on a flat, lifeless surface. The answer wasn’t in my brain, but under
it. I noticed how the corners of my pillow bulged under the weight of my head when I lay down to go to sleep. The shapes changed as my weight shifted.

  After school the following day, I walked to a nearby creek and gathered rocks that corresponded to the sizes and colors of the ships in Manet’s paintings. Then, I carefully arranged them on a turquoise-colored pillow in the same orientation. Heavier rocks sunk lower; smaller stones sat higher. The deeper the depression in one spot, the more inflated the bulge in another. Weight and counterweight are integral components in constructing paintings; each stroke displaces another, and the entire image changes. My mother bought every turquoise pillow in town as I churned out working studies of the entire book. While my friends were outside playing basketball, I was in my room playing with rocks and pillows. That’s how someone stays a virgin until twenty-two.

  Tired of buying pillows and razors, my mother asked the English teacher, who also painted, if he would give me some watercolor lessons after school. His name was Tom. Once a week, my brother John, a girl named Melissa, who had blonde pigtails, and I appeared at the classroom with our watercolor pads. Tom would close the door, put on a Richard Pryor album, and we’d paint. I took devilish pleasure in the fact that there was one kind of school from eight to two thirty, but at three o’clock, a different kind of school began. The timing, irreverence, and freedom in those comedy albums taught me to relax, breathe, and be myself while I worked. They also taught me how to use repetition as a compositional device, just as a comedian structures a joke in threes: two to establish a pattern and one to break it. Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza’s terrific 2005 film The Aristocrats features over one hundred comedians telling the same joke to explore the richness and breadth of artists working within formal limitations; George Carlin and Miles Davis do essentially the same thing, just in different media. Each riffs within rules. They begin and end alone and exposed, attempting to create a world that is spacious and untenable, dying a little with each performance. I still play Richard Pryor in my studio late at night to further my education.

  If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of the horn.

  —Charlie Parker

  Animal

  I played drums seriously throughout high school and was very good. In addition to my rock bands Impulse and XXX, which performed in front of thousands of people in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, I had a jazz trio and played percussion in a Renaissance music consort called the Charleston Pro Musica; I still have my mustard-colored tunic and wear it when I want to see my kids vomit. I never intended to make a living as an artist. My plan was to make money from music to support painting, which is like selling poems to support a juggling career. Like most plans, it didn’t work.

  My undergraduate studies began in 1983 at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. Within days of my arrival, I immersed myself in its excellent School of the Arts. My first painting class was William Halsey’s last. Born in 1915, Halsey is considered the father of abstract painting in South Carolina. His fully dimensional use of color was an early influence on my work, as were the poetic images of Corrie McCallum, his wife. Corrie and I also shared a love of chamber music and would eat grilled cheese sandwiches while listening to Bartók string quartets in her Archdale Street studio. My work ethic impressed the faculty, and soon I was given not one but two private studios on opposite ends of the fine arts department, one for painting and one for my massive drum kit. I also scored a master key to every room in the building, which no one knew about, until now. Whenever I was struggling with a new painting, I would drag it from my studio to my drum room and play as I looked at the painting. Somehow, having all four of my limbs moving in syncopation while looking at a static image intensified my understanding of the inanimate nature of oil paint, reminding me that vitality is not rendered by the artist, but projected by the viewer. Paint is passive; looking is active.

  Although I had a dormitory with roommates on campus, I secretly lived in the fine arts building, where I’d paint into the early morning and sleep on a dirty orange bench carried up from the lobby each night. I returned it before sunrise. On more than one occasion, faculty members—and even visiting prospective students and their parents—unlocked my studio door to find me splayed out in my underwear, snoring. They never said a word.

  Each week, in the middle of the night, I installed massive multipaneled paintings that sprawled across the floor, up the wall, and onto the ceiling; people couldn’t move through the public spaces without navigating through my painted environments. No one gave me permission; I just did stuff. That kind of unchecked liberty empowered me to explore other disciplines: I built a stage set for the Robert Ivey Ballet, worked in the costume shop, made sculpture in the foundry, cataloged slides in the art history library, and installed shows in the college’s art gallery.

  Every spring the Halsey Gallery (now the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art) sponsored a “Young Contemporaries” exhibition in which an outside curator was invited to select the strongest students for a polished, one-month-long show. Two of my paintings were included in 1985. Until then I had never seen my work displayed on a clean, well-lit wall, because I destroyed everything after making it. Not being precious allowed me to move swiftly through mistakes and eliminate what didn’t interest me. I sat by the gallery door all night long eating Hardee’s cinnamon buns washed down with burnt coffee so I’d be the first one to install my work. From that show, I was handpicked by David L. Shirey, chair of the Master of Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, to enter its two-year MFA program. I was moving to New York.

  I can’t say enough about the importance of a faculty that catapults students into new experiences and allows them the permission to make mistakes along the way. The School of the Arts at the College of Charleston was my home and the entire building was my working space. There were complaints that I was too aggressive, but no action was taken. Someone had my back.

  Performing with the Charleston Pro Musica. 1987.

  With my high school rock band Impulse. I made the fake gong out of cardboard and paint. 1983.

  Landing in NYC

  In May 1987, I graduated from the College of Charleston and, three weeks later, moved to New York City to attend the Master of Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts. I was twenty-one years old and had never lived in a big city. To me, crack was something you did to an egg, rush hour was getting to the beach by high tide to go fishing, and a power lunch was grilled cheese on the hood of a car. I took a yellow taxi to 133 W. Twenty-First Street with two large black Samsonite suitcases, one full of brushes and the other my clothes, which included an emergency envelope containing $500 cash and a one-way plane ticket back to Myrtle Beach on Piedmont Airlines in case things didn’t work out. Those suitcases have followed me to every studio since and serve a symbolic as well as practical purpose. Because of my height, my worktable needs to be higher than the standard tables found in office supply stores. Laying the suitcases on their sides and resting the table legs on top brings my eight-foot-long work surface to an ideal waist level. The present is supported by the past, literally. One of those suitcases remains unopened. The emergency envelope and plane ticket within are unused. Piedmont doesn’t even exist anymore. I guess things worked out.

  My first New York residence was the Sloane House YMCA on Thirty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, near Madison Square Garden. Now luxury condominiums, “Slime House” in the late 1980s was a cheap, dimly lit lodging residence teeming with hookers and the semihomeless. My tenth-floor “suite” was so small that I could lie in bed and open the door with my toes. The fluorescent-lit communal men’s bathroom featured yellow shower curtains with dick-sized holes cut at waist level, hair-clogged sinks, and shelves littered with bottles of Gas-X and lube; one morning, I saw a dead body under a white sheet on a gurney being rolled out of the kitchen, heads of lettuce keeping the sheet from blowing off in the wind; pour one out for the poor bastards who ordered salad that night. I w
as never happier.

  Every morning, I’d grab a black coffee at the corner deli and walk thirteen blocks downtown to my TwentyFirst Street studio. For the next two years, I never deviated from that routine, not even once. Something uncanny happens when you repeat the same behavior thousands of times: the familiar becomes unrecognizable. I noticed perfectly bound bundles of cardboard that migrated from basements up to the curb for sanitation pickup in the predawn darkness. Like soft caramels stamped with Chinese logos in dark green ink, those cubes enticed me so much that I dragged them into my studio and created multi-paneled cardboard paintings on which I drew with electrical tape, wire, polyurethane, charcoal, and oil paint. They were organic and open-ended environments that swelled into every part of the room, incorporating the radiator, windows, and fire escape. At the suggestion of the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, I decided to limit my palette to mars black and buff white; all other color had to come from found materials. Cardboard is the color of cubism. I had been studying the analytic cubist paintings of Georges Braque and noted how their limited palette drew attention to line and structure.

  My studio brimmed with so many cardboard pieces that I would leave them on the steps of random brownstones in Chelsea on my walk back to the dorm late each night. The following morning, I’d spot them on the curb with the morning trash; however, more than once, I saw them through the window hanging on a wall. Either way, it didn’t matter, because my goal was to make something from the street and return it there. My teachers were delighted because they had an entirely new body of work to talk about every two weeks, after which I would destroy everything and start over. Nothing was precious. I was making work, not art.