Clear Seeing Place

by Brian Rutenberg

  Glenn Gould has been referred to as eccentric, difficult, and even insane. I disagree. He practiced constantly, had a trenchant wit, and didn’t take himself too seriously. He gave his life unconditionally to his work and protected that life from outside intrusion. Sounds like sanity to me. Gould also possessed a keen marketing sense and branded himself long before artists were expected to do so. Like R. Crumb, who drew on place mats in French restaurants, he perfected the state of being social and detached simultaneously, eating alone in diners and living anonymously in a ground-floor suite at the Four Seasons Inn on the Park in a Toronto suburb. Gould suffered the stroke that eventually killed him in that room. After his death, it was converted (appropriately) into a storage unit for audio-visual equipment. I snuck in late one night and slept on the cold floor until the sun came up.

  Although world-famous for the brittle clarity of his playing and controversial ideas (he wanted to “ban applause” and “try prison”), Gould was also a tender man yearning for transcendence through the poetry of place. Geography was primary to his thinking, especially the vast abstraction of the Canadian north. This deep awareness of internal and external orientation struck a chord in me; his sound documentary The Idea of North is still one of my favorite recordings and is best experienced under the covers, naked, through expensive headphones.

  Glenn Herbert Gould died a few days after his fiftieth birthday on October 4, 1982, when I was a junior in high school. I never met him and wouldn’t have wanted to, because everything was in the work. On the eve of my fiftieth birthday in September 2015, I thought about what it meant to outlive my hero. What is a hero? What do they provide? Heroes don’t need us to imitate them. That’s easy. They slam the door in our faces so that we have to sneak around the back and pick the lock, only to discover that it’s been changed. They say, “Don’t do as I do. Figure it out for yourself.” Gradually finding one’s voice through trial and error is far richer than emulating someone else’s. The best teachers aren’t those who solve problems, but those who give us permission to create them. My hero taught me how to craft a life as an artist and, more important, how to protect it. It has been said that every work of art is about the loss and regaining of identity. Glenn Gould introduced me to myself.

  The Wind

  Will Barnet was a great American artist and a gentleman. I met Will through the sculptor John Raimondi, who had introduced him to my paintings. Over many years and dozens of braised pork chops in the dining room of the National Arts Club, where he lived in an elegant apartment upstairs with his lovely wife, Elena, Will regaled us with stories about having Mark Rothko as a pupil, riding the train to Philadelphia with Stuart Davis to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and drinking with Pollock and de Kooning. He even knew Ashcan painters.

  Will was fifty-five years older, but he spoke to me as an equal. He loved my paintings and saw every show I had in New York, even when he was in a wheelchair, always leaving a handwritten note. I saw Will for the last time having supper in the club two weeks before he passed away. I knelt down, as he was hard of hearing, and kissed his cheek. He looked at me and said how much he believed in what I was doing, and that I was a real painter. On November 13, 2012, Will passed away at 101. He didn’t die—painters don’t die. They stand in the wind growing thinner and thinner until only the wind remains. He once told me that the last thing he did before going to sleep was drink a tall glass of ice water. Now I do the same thing. Then I lie down and surrender to the shameless wind.

  Greg and Johnny

  Two men shaped my early career: the painter Gregory Amenoff and sculptor/dealer John Raimondi. Greg hired me as his studio assistant, supported my work, and got me a gallery job when I was desperate for income. In that same gallery, I met my future wife and had my New York solo debut. His family became mine at a time when I was homesick for South Carolina. Greg also introduced me to one of my best friends, who has championed my work for over twenty-five years, John Raimondi. If Greg is the Empire State Building, then Johnny is the Chrysler Building, each one of a kind. Johnny owns more of my work than anyone else and has placed my paintings in major public and private collections. He has the best eye I’ve ever encountered and an encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century art, and he showed me how to navigate the art world. Greg and Johnny are the big brothers I never had. Both men have been at my side for every important event in my life and career. Most of us are lucky if we get one skyscraper in a lifetime. I got two.

  SEEING

  Counting Sand

  You can’t look anywhere in Manhattan without seeing scaffolding stuck to buildings like barnacles on a ship’s hull. Every New Yorker has had to cross the street to avoid those steel poles holding up wooden planks—or worse, descend into damp tunnels that run below a worksite and dump people out into another time and dimension like a wormhole in deep space. I love scaffolding because I’m fascinated by the idea of building something to build something.

  My childhood goal was to count every grain of sand on earth, as if an inventory of each particle would uncover some greater truth. I told everyone of my plan, even stealing cups, tweezers, and a magnifying glass from my brother’s bug- collecting kit. Although less than a thimbleful was actually counted, something far more miraculous happened. I began thinking like an artist. Artists are people who have the right dreams at the wrong time. They set out impossible tasks for themselves and always fall short. For me, it wasn’t the number of grains counted, but the guileless notion that it was worth trying in the first place. Sometimes the truth isn’t discovered, but manufactured. I orchestrated a consummate failure, gave up, and found lucidity.

  Art fails us. It is lifeless and incomplete. We project our vitality into it, and, in return, it compensates us for life’s impermanence. By magnifying its limitations, art shows us that perfection is unattainable; it’s the longing that matters. All artists live in the gap between what they imagine and produce; no finished painting ever looks as good as the one I see in my mind, but the next one might. Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Art is part skill and part insanity; too much concept or technique comes across as dry and pretentious, while too much craziness without the chops to deliver it in tenable form is . . . well . . . crazy. Shout your nutty ideas to the world; we need more crazy. Society doesn’t expect artists to play it safe. Insulate your foolish self from sensible people. If you’re lucky, that insulation will last a lifetime, and you’ll produce meaningful work, but first you have to make something to make something. Is the real work of art the building or the scaffolding?

  Tell me, which is mightier: polished granite or the lucent wings of a butterfly?

  Dare to wear the foolish clown face.

  —Frank Sinatra

  Declaration of Independence

  Memory is a word often used when speaking about painting, especially abstraction; the artist “paints from memory” or their work is “about memory.” I don’t believe that painting can be about memory because we don’t know what the painting looked like before, nor can we anticipate what it will look like later. Painting is experience, not the recreation of it.

  Vintage photography can document what East End prostitutes looked like, but a Camden Town painting by Walter Sickert allows you to feel their moist breath on the back of your neck because you are inches away from the evidence of its creation. Intimacy isn’t represented but innate, because you are standing in the same spot as Sickert when he applied each greasy shingle of color.

  Memory requires that some past event made an impression upon or seduced the artist. Therefore, working from memory implies the recreation of seduction, which is the definition of kitsch.

  As the product of a beach resort, I admit my first reality was kitsch, and I adore it. Garishness, absurdity, and new things made to appear old fascinate me; placing style over substance suggests a desperate, hasty type of love that is both humorous and melancholic. Kitsch embodies r
espect for misplaced priorities that I find genuinely beautiful. You will never hear me use words like corny or sentimental, and I don’t like people who do. I hate cynicism in art. Say what you mean from your heart. Duke Ellington said, “If it sounds good, it is good.” The same applies to a visual experience. If it looks good, it is good. Authenticity is elastic. I will fully commit to anything that delivers a complex and enduring experience no matter if it was carved from ivory five centuries ago or mass-produced and covered with LED lights last week.

  Professor/Philosopher Denis Dutton wrote about “nominal authenticity,” which refers to a work of art having been created by its purported creator (not a forgery), and “expressive authenticity,” in which a work of art is a genuine expression of an individual’s or a culture’s beliefs or morals. Knowing one’s origins, geographically and culturally, ensures authenticity, but lusting to be something you weren’t born into is equally genuine, because you chose it—it didn’t choose you. Whatever makes you feel the most like yourself is authentic.

  For the first fifteen years of my life, a large framed reproduction of Emanuel Leutze’s masterpiece Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) hung over my childhood bed. I spent hours staring at it as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and as the sun filled my room like a tidal pool in the morning. Although I had no idea what the image meant, I sensed the artist transmitting pulsations through the glacial monumentality of the shapes, the solid triangular composition, and the use of red to tug my eye across the center of the image. I grew into a young man under that reproduction, and, one winter’s night, everything became clear. Although the picture represents a seminal event in American history, its real power and import lie in the enactment of place—not George Washington’s, but mine. That reproduction was not a recreation of a past event, but an image carefully constructed by a skilled artist to intensify the present; it was a declaration of location, not in the musty halls of history, but right there under my sneakers. Emanuel Leutze loved me enough to have made this thing for me to see.

  Years later, I begged my parents to take me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the original, and it reduced me to a jellyfish on the floor. Speechless, I stood inches away from the brushstrokes and felt as if it had been painted for my eyes only. Leutze and I joined nervous systems and made something from nothing. We crafted a place and discovered it at the same time.

  Look, I made a hat

  Where there never was a hat.

  —Stephen Sondheim

  Blankness

  I hate snow. For a Southerner, the word should always be followed by “cone” or “globe.” My idea of hell is being cold, wet, and having to carry shit. But every couple of years, we spend Christmas with family in Alaska in some of the most rugged and beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen. On one such trip, while my wife and children were curled up by the fire, I zipped into a coat the size of a tree trunk and wandered alone into a nearby meadow at dusk. The bruised light made it difficult to see where the mountains ended and the sky began. Every sensation was multiplied. I could hear ice pellets crackling on my shoulders and feel warm blood spurting up my neck with each hiccup of my heart. There was no focal point, only gradations of light. I was standing in total blankness, seeing myself seeing.

  Good painting is a container for blankness. I don’t mean that there is no content or imagery, but that the painting becomes an open-ended container into which viewers project themselves. Technique vanishes, style fades, opacity gives way to transparency, and, for a moment, you don’t recognize what you see. I know a painting is trying too hard when I can describe it.

  Art is a form of containment, yet it’s important to remember that a container not only keeps stuff inside but also protects it from the outside. Piet Mondrian wrote about the discord arising from the fact that, as human beings, we are neither part of nature, nor able to exist without it. Art ameliorates this tension by allowing us to do things that we can’t in real life. When artifice acts as a stand-in for nature, we are free to have an experience for the sheer sake of experience, without the desire for gain or the risk of peril. An actor applying fake blood and collapsing onstage isn’t glorifying death but celebrating health, because he or she isn’t really injured. Art celebrates life by cheating death. There are so few surprises anymore. Before I leave my apartment in the morning, I already know the weather, the subway schedule, with whom I’ll be having breakfast, lunch, and dinner, where the Dow will open, and a summary of world news from the BBC. The farther I am removed from the laws of nature, the more I compensate by exaggerating the laws of art.

  Speed

  Although a painting is a static object, time plays a fundamental role in the viewer’s experience. Our attention is like money; we only have so much of it to spend. Therefore, a painter must be aware of the viewer’s spending plan. Long, fluid strokes race the eye swiftly from one part of the painting to another, while short, denuded jabs stutter the viewer’s gaze, allowing him or her to wander into other areas. Zigzags appear slow, while curves are fast; Picasso often employed these contrasts side by side, especially in the Blue Period. Walter Sickert and Edgar Degas rendered arms and legs in short dashes that ran counter to the length of the limb, slowing our eyes down to revel in fleshy fullness. If I have a particular color combination in which I want the viewer to dwell, I use broken lines and fragmented colors to halt the eye and draw attention to those areas.

  I can get a similar effect by using contrasting hues, like bright purple and permanent green or cherry red and cobalt teal, which arrest the viewer’s gaze and give him or her time to consider more subtle arrangements nearby. Painting doesn’t tell a story, yet it has a beginning, middle, and end. We invest time looking at the surface, dipping in and out of our thoughts, embroidering our vitality onto colored skins, and moving from interior to exterior intuitively. All of this happens in rhythm. Looking at a painting is, at first, like looking out a window on a rainy day: you see either the individual raindrops on the glass or what lies beyond, but not both at the same time. You look at the painted surface or into pictorial illusion. However, a miraculous union rewards the patient viewer. Surface and illusion begin to hum together in a flash of lucidity and expansiveness. Through repeated encounters, the concrete gives way to the transient.

  My children ask me when human beings will be able to travel through time; I tell them we already can. We always have. Painting is time travel. A photograph is the same time at the top of the image as at the bottom. However, in painting, it’s a different time with every kiss the brush gives the canvas. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual moments are stacked like deli meat, all working in unison. You are simultaneously peering back in time and being slingshot into the present. Painting can do what nothing else can: it compresses time and accelerates slowness, as if filming a slug inching across your back porch and then playing the film on fast-forward. My paintings are slugs.

  Style

  When painting students ask me how to create a style, I tell them that they’ve just taken a colossal step in the wrong direction. Thinking about style means you are thinking about style and not painting. The best way to find your voice is to make a lot of work and destroy all of it. The most important thing is to show up every day, no matter how dreadful the results. Amateurs worry that their paintings look like they are painted by different people. So what? Try everything and eliminate. A beginner should blend in, not stand out. Stay in the tall grass and work as much as possible. Matisse made a painting, then a painting of the painting. Picasso made paintings of Matisse’s paintings. They were fearless, and they worked constantly. It’s OK to screw up; just do it gloriously.

  I attended graduate school when smart painting—works that required pages of theory, contextual preface, and a short nap—was in high fashion. Classical beauty and emotion were seen as indulgent, seductive, and anti- intellectual. Technique was object driven, and all that mattered were ideas. But viewers shouldn’t have to hold a degree in theoretical constructs t
o look. All they need are two eyeballs and some time. Sure, categories of taste can be refined with experienced looking, but I believe that the mind innately knows when something is harmonious, no degree required.

  Museums are full of paintings, but the ones that endure do look better than the rest. Is this good taste or is there some common denominator? Both, probably. It’s fashionable to say that beauty can’t be defined, or that it’s in the eye of the beholder: a claim usually made by those who can’t draw or paint. Beauty can, and should, be defined. There has to be some aesthetic paradigm, a set of visual prerequisites. Otherwise, all paintings are beautiful, and therefore none are. George Santayana wrote, “Beauty is the cooperation of pleasures, truth the cooperation of perceptions.” Western ideals of beauty are rooted in principles promulgated by the ancient Greeks and Romans, such as proportion, harmony, scale, line, contrast, and the treatment of light. Art history shows us over and over that the thoughtful arrangement of form and the calibration of color can transmit emotions and stir cognition in ways impossible to verbalize. That’s why it’s visual art.