The School of Visual Arts, or SVA, was fabulous. David Shirey and his administrator, Kathy Schnapper, were kind to me. They still are. The program was intellectually stimulating, and I was challenged to question and reinvent myself. There was decent studio space, twenty-four-hour access, and no limits. In addition, the school operated its own art gallery on Prince Street in SoHo, which was the center of the New York art world in those days. I was fortunate to have been included in several faculty-curated group exhibitions, which gave students hands-on experience in how to construct a gallery show from concept to transportation, installation, promotion, and opening reception. I even made sales and gained some useful contacts. At SVA, I studied closely with well-known artists and critics like Darby Bannard, Robert Mangold, Judy Pfaff, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Jackie Winsor, Joe Zucker, Loren Madsen, Clement Greenberg, and Vito Acconci. However, one teacher towered over the others like the Empire State Building. His name was Gregory Amenoff.
Studio shot. 2016. The two black suitcases I used to move to New York now support my painting table.
Early hallway show. School of Visual Arts, New York City. 1987.
After Graduate School
After graduating from SVA with a master’s degree in 1989, I moved into a dark three-hundred-square-foot ground-floor studio apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, for $365 a month, which I could barely afford. Queens is the most boring of the five boroughs, and boredom is jet fuel for creativity. I took long evening walks down Northern Boulevard, read poetry in the back of Jackson Diner, and made small paintings in my room living on Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch and sweet iced tea. To earn money, I did art handling, worked as a studio assistant, and helped out in two art galleries. My expenses were low enough to afford the maximum amount of time in the apartment. On one side of my room was a single bed with a small television and my complete Star Trek video collection. On the other was a blue tarp that covered the beige carpet and most of the wall as protection from flying paint. In the middle of the tarp was an old floor-tom from my drum kit, which doubled as an easel on which to lean paintings, and I mixed colors directly on the drumhead. Except for a couple of group shows in the South, I stayed alone in my room and worked.
By 1992, I had a decent body of small paintings and, at the suggestion of Gregory Amenoff, applied for a grant from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, which awards twenty-eight free studios to working artists for a year. I got one. My corner studio on Greenwich and Vestry Streets in TriBeCa faced the original World Trade Center Towers seven blocks downtown. I loved those towers and would eat turkey sandwiches on the roof at night while gazing up at their immensity. For the first time, my life was getting interesting, I thought.
With hard work, it might even become fascinating.
Me in my tiny Queens apartment and studio. 1989.
I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
—Truman Capote
Renting Studio Space
After a productive year in the studio program, it was time to vacate, so three fellow “Sharpies” and I pooled our money and rented a huge empty space on the fifth floor of the same building, 443 Greenwich Street. We did the demo and build-out ourselves, dividing a raw space into five spacious private studios, which we named “Five on Five”: my studiomates and I would remain there for sixteen years until someone planted a $400 million maple tree in front of the lobby. Allegedly, an investor bought the entire building for $200 million with plans to sink another $200 million into creating a boutique hotel and condominium complex. That fucking tree meant that we should look for other forests. Rents were tripled, and we were forced out.
No matter—artists are survivors, always a step ahead of everyone else. We move on to other neighborhoods, make them hip, and the cycle repeats. My studiomates and I found bigger, better digs in the Flatiron District. We rented the entire sixth floor of a new building, took on two extra tenants to defray costs, and renamed ourselves “Six on Six.” New York is wicked expensive. Having studiomates is the only way to find affordable workspace.
Working in Galleries
Contrary to claims by other great cities, New York City is still the capital of the art world. A handful of bluechip galleries create art stars and determine values, big auction houses brand them, and critics write about them. Although the contemporary art world likes to think of itself as open-minded and inclusive, it is tribal and conservative. As we all learned in high school, when there are insiders, there are outsiders.
From 1987 to 1995, I worked at Cavin-Morris Gallery, which is owned by Shari Cavin and Randall Morris, pioneers in the field of self-taught and folk art. It was a joyful space, reverberating with music, lively conversation, and the spicy bouquet of Jamaican takeout. Regulars included Jonathan Demme, Tony Fitzpatrick, Ellen Page Wilson, Bert Hemphill, David Byrne, Geoffrey Holder, Eric Bogosian, and the late playwright Lanford Wilson, who had just finished Burn This when we met. Lanford was an avid art collector and took a special interest in me because I had just moved to New York City from the South. We would talk about our respective Lowcountry and Ozark cultures (he was born and raised in Lebanon, Missouri) and how an artist can grow a rich lexicon of language and imagery over a lifetime by continually tilling the loam of a specific region. We also discussed religion. He was raised Baptist and I a Methodist. Then there was cheese. Lanford rhapsodized on the splendors of fine aged cheddar from the heartland with adjectives like “sulfuric” and “barnyardy.”
Such strong personalities kept things fresh and unpredictable in the front room. However, my education took place in the back with the storage racks. I couldn’t imagine a better classroom for a young painter, because it immersed me in the visions of artists who made work utterly devoid of cynicism. Self-taught artists don’t need the art world or its approval; they don’t even need art supplies. A ballpoint pen was a scalpel in the hand of Chelo Amezcua, and a mealy paste of soot and saliva on shirt board was all James Castle required to chart intimate and complex systems. Each created personal universes that would have arisen regardless of whether the art world was looking. Theirs is not art about art, but a way of fitting into this world by inventing another. I kept my pie hole shut and my eyes open.
An art school education is like an air bag. A trained artist can employ fluid drawing technique and deft color handling to create competent sophisticated paintings, but sometimes too much skill insulates the artist from the viewer. That insulation is missing in self-taught art. I developed a deep love for, and bought works by, Jon Serl, James Castle, George Liautaud, William Edmondson, Joseph Yoakum, Kevin Sampson, Gregory Van Maanen, and Bessie Harvey, paying off paintings in installments with a small percentage of each paycheck.
More than a job, that experience stamped my passport for entrance into the vast country of the New York art world by teaching me to avoid trends and stay grounded amid the cutthroat competitiveness of the market. Most of all, it taught me that if there is no inside, there is no outside, only good and bad painting. I’m a mainstream artist, but my heart beats with the mavericks.
Jon Serl and me. 1992.
I paint so I can fuck a little longer.
—Jon Serl
New York Debut
A solo show in New York City is an honor and a big deal. Mine was in 1993 in that same gallery. One of Cavin-Morris’s prominent clients, Peter Du Bois, had seen my paintings in a local group show and started buying everything I made. Although I already had an impressive résumé, my work hadn’t gained much traction in the Northeast, so the timing was ideal. Without my knowledge, Peter invited Randall and Shari to his cavernous TriBeCa loft for a viewing. They liked what they saw and asked for a studio visit. Fortunately, I had just completed a new body of work during my tenure at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation that would eventually become my River Paintings. I had also joined the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco on Greg Amenoff’s reco
mmendation, so the decision was made to mount solo exhibitions on both coasts.
In September 1993, “River Paintings” opened in New York and San Francisco with a handsome catalog written by critic/artist Stephen Westfall; that publication occasionally appears on eBay. Both shows were well attended, got a great review in Art in America, and sold out. I asked for half of my earnings in cash because I wanted to have a pillowcase full of money to go with my pillowcase of rejection letters from galleries, a matching set. My mother often sent me care packages with clean bed linens; I painted on cardboard because I couldn’t afford canvas but I slept on six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Although it was terrific that the paintings sold, it was to whom that was notable: small- and medium-sized art museums; the South Carolina Arts Commission; the Federal Reserve Bank; European, Middle Eastern, and Asian collectors; and even other respected New York art dealers like Allan Stone and Spencer Throckmorton. When a reporter asked me how it felt to have such a successful debut in New York City, I said it felt wonderful, but I say the same thing about every show no matter where it is. Whether the work sells or not, an exhibition anywhere is a privilege, not a right. Those rejection letters never let me forget how fortunate I am. Besides, a drummer can always find a job, right?
When asked to list my career highlights, I don’t have any. Everything is a highlight. Amateurs have triumphs; I just show up every day and make stuff. All it takes is one person to change everything. The trick is to recognize them. The circus performer Karl Wallenda said, “Life is the wire. The rest is just waiting.” That spring a twenty-one-year-old NYU art history major with chocolate eyes and a pale blue sundress walked into the gallery. My wire was about to happen.
Selecting work for my NYC gallery debut. Cavin-Morris Gallery. 1992.
To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that.
—Ingmar Bergman
Katie
In 1993, on the recommendation of the art historian Ed Sullivan, twenty-one-year-old Kathryn Peck was hired by Cavin-Morris Gallery as a part-time assistant. I had recently joined their stable of artists but worked there two days a week to supplement my income. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She still is. On our breaks we’d talk about Rainer Maria Rilke and Sandro Botticelli over carrot muffins with cream cheese frosting washed down with iced coffee from Dean & Deluca. I took fake sips to stretch my time with her as long as possible. Sometimes I’d walk her home. Katie lived in the heart of Greenwich Village on Bleecker and MacDougal, and my apartment was at 23 Grove Street and Bedford. Just as we were becoming good friends, I was awarded a studio grant and quit the gallery to paint full-time. Katie subsequently left to start premed at NYU. Although we fell out of touch, she never left my mind. After two failed relationships, I was determined to find her again. She was looking for me too.
Three years later, Katie returned to the gallery hoping to find me and reconnect. She signed the guest book. By chance, I came in the following day and noticed her signature, the last one on that page. Had one more visitor scrawled his or her name, it would have started a new page, and my life would be very different. I ran back to my apartment and composed a long handwritten letter, which ended with my phone number. After a three-hour call, we agreed to meet at my pal Kevin Sampson’s opening and after-party; my friends said they could see electrical sparks between us at dinner. Early the next morning, as the city slept, I sat in a tiny Greenwich Village bedroom and wrote my wedding toast.
The reason I am telling you all of this is that the secret to my success as an artist was marrying the right person. The love and stability of a good marriage to a self-reliant spouse can knock the legs out from under any problem the world can fling at your windshield. It was the most important decision of my life, and I nailed it. Now I could get to work.
Katie and me. 2014.
As azure is to the eagle, as to the ship the sea. As the deer is to the wildwood, so you are home to me.
—Archibald Rutledge
Being a Father and a Painter
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a daddy. Katie and I have two beautiful children, but balancing a career and family is not easy; it’s agony to leave the studio when a painting sucks and reset into domestic life, homework, dinnertime, baths, and the many phases of bedtime. After my kids are tucked in, I take a scalding hot shower to Frank Sinatra and dry off under the hair dryer on the hottest setting. Then, I drink a glass of ice water and collapse into bed. As I drift to sleep, my mind ponders other types of work, critical jobs such as police officer, doctor, soldier, firefighter, and teacher. I try to imagine losing a bleeding patient in the operating room or shouldering eighty pounds of equipment up a flight of stairs in thousand- degree heat, and I remember that an artist has the best job on earth.
Every morning, I ride the subway with my fellow New Yorkers going to their respective jobs. They wear gray business suits or silk dresses; others don uniforms decorated with logos such as UPS or FedEx. I dress like a middle-aged fat guy going to a kegger. Most people carry a briefcase or backpack. This morning I had a rubber hose and a DVD boxed set of Green Acres. My job is weird, but the thought of not doing it is weirder. I know how fortunate I am. When a doctor has a bad day, someone dies; a lousy day for a painter is the wrong tone of pink. But our job is critical in other ways. There is no culture unless we show up for work. Artists aren’t team players; we’re narcissistic, easily offended, often medicated, and blue. (I realize I’ve just described Cookie Monster.) We’re dreamers, and there is no civilization without dreamers. We don’t do it for the attention and certainly not for the money. We do it for the pure love of the thing. Kenneth Clark wrote, “Facts become art through love.” A painter must fall madly in love with absolutely everything. The instant that work becomes labor, you’re dead.
Having children made me a better artist because I feel a love that I didn’t think possible, as if a new organ sprouted in my chest. Fatherhood also meant that I’d worry every minute for the rest of my life. The first couple of years are just suicide watch, keeping fingers out of outlets and little feet away from stairs, but when a child’s personality emerges, it is wondrous and funny beyond words.
When my daughter asked if I was the tooth fairy, I said, “Yes, honey, I am the fairy.”
She thought for a moment. “You fly all over the world and collect the children’s teeth?”
My heart filled with joy because we saw the same thing from two different vantage points. To an adult, a child’s toy is trivial. However, the world that child creates around it is rich and spacious. I don’t know about you, but my childhood was spent in blissful boredom, fishing in lakes and wandering along creek beds with nothing to do; a single day seemed to last forever. There were no plans, only happenings. Ask any kid to describe their day, and they’ll say, “This happened. Then this happened. Then that happened.” Painting restores the spaciousness of childhood and reminds us of things we knew but forgot, because art is carefully orchestrated wandering. If you’re in a hurry, you’ll miss everything. To be a painter, you must have more patience than anyone else in the room and know how to disappear in plain view. Becoming a father taught me both. Plus, how seriously can you take yourself while wiping someone’s boogers on a tree?
Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,
While pain and guilt still linger here below,
Blindness and numbness—these please me alone;
Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.
—Michelangelo Buonarroti
Freedom
My father died of stage IV lung cancer on September 17, 2012, the day before my forty- seventh birthday. Two days later, I opened a solo exhibition at Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, NC. His last words to me were, “Don’t miss your opening.” I attended my reception in a black suit, did a slide talk the next morning, got into a van with a thermos of black coffee, and returned to Myrtle Beach for the funeral wearing the same suit, all within thirty-six hours. You
can watch that slide talk on Vimeo by typing “Jerald Melberg, Brian Rutenberg Coffee & Conversation 2012.” You’ll see me tear up when I mention him.
When my father was the age I am now (fifty), he was surf fishing alone on a silvery Carolina Sunday and hooked a hundred-dollar bill. After untangling the soggy note from strands of seaweed, he drove his blue station wagon to Western Sizzler and ordered the biggest steak on the menu, medium rare. Then he drove back to the beach, crouched on the hard sand, and ate the meat with his bare hands.
Following his death, after my next show opened in New York City, I took a hundred- dollar bill from the ATM, walked to Old Homestead Steakhouse on Ninth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and ordered the biggest rib eye on the menu, medium rare. Then, I sat on a stoop in the Village and ate the meat with my hands. It tasted like freedom.
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