Brian Rutenberg: Reeds Rise

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Brian Rutenberg Reeds Rise June 11 through July 17, 2021

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Reeds Rise 6 (detail), 2021, oil on linen, 53 x 68 inches

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Brian Rutenberg: Reeds Rise Reeds Rise From Water rippling under my eyes bulrushes tuft the shore at every instant I expect what is hidden everywhere - Samuel Menashe One of the great honors of my life was befriending the American poet Samuel Menashe, whose work I discovered at the suggestion of poet William Corbett in 2002, back when Pluto was a planet and HBO was Home Box Office. I read everything I could get my hands on and then called him on the phone. We spoke cordially and agreed to meet in person.

Days later, I was sitting beside Samuel on a bench in Vesuviuo Playground in the West Village feeding pigeons and talking about life as artists in our great city. He was very interested in my paintings and, over the next ten years, came to every show I had in New York. He began sending me handwritten letters that included old poems as well as works in progress and even did a private reading for my painting class at the 92nd Street Y Art Center on the Upper East Side. My students sat transfixed beside their easels in the dark as Samuel stood under a spotlight reciting his best-known works in a mellifluous baritone.

For a 2005 solo show in New York, Samuel granted me permission to use his poem “Reeds Rise from Water” in the exhibition catalog. Sixteen years later, I’m doing it again. My entire philosophy of art is quilled in the contemplative energy, luxurious beauty, and strange incantatory spell of his remarkable poem.

For example, “Reeds Rise from Water” embodies a marriage between nature and art, one hinting at the other. In just a palmful of words, we are catapulted from extreme foreground (“under my eyes”) to distant background (“bulrushes tuft the shore”) just as a painter uses foreground and background to establish pictorial depth. This technique is an artist’s way of declaring love for the viewer, as if to say, “Trust your sensitivity. It’s safe to go over there. I know because I’ve already been there for you.” A painter should always have the viewer’s back, giving him/her/they the impression that hidden eyes have seen the painting from every possible angle, so that it’s warmed up and worn-in before the viewer ever arrives.

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Essay continued

Reeds Rise 6, 2021, oil on linen, 53 x 68 inches

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Spartina 8, 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

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Spartina 9, 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 24 inches

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Spartina 6, 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

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A painter should always have the viewer’s back, giving him/her/they the impression that hidden eyes have seen the painting from every possible angle, so that it’s warmed up and worn-in before the viewer ever arrives. What astounded me most about Samuel’s poetry is how he got such spaciousness into so few words. His work taught me about economy of design, not “Less is more,” which I disagree with (Less is less), but clarity of intention.

If it doesn’t help, take it out. What’s the least amount of information your painting can have and still be a painting?

I am a son of the South Carolina Lowcountry. It was there that my childhood antennae picked up signals on the riverine coast where oyster shells, delicate as pastry, cupped shallow puddles of saltwater that smelled of sweet liquor and brine. My paintings present the landscape in the same way I learned to see it, by lying on my belly with my chin in the dirt, foreground so close I can taste it and background far away. No middle ground. I once tried this on the Great Lawn in Central Park but the Police made me leave. Seeing from a bug’s-eye view instantly compresses space, like closing an accordion, and makes the viewer complicit in reconstructing the landscape; I provide the close-up and the far away, and the viewer supplies the middle. This is nothing new.

The Canadian Group of Seven painters from the 1920s and 1930s eliminated middle ground in order to give the spectator the impression of being in direct proximity with the raw power of nature. Imagine any landscape painting and you’ll see a fixed view of a place, a static vantage point, which automatically implies someone standing there gazing at that location. The physical painting acts as a stand-in for the solitary viewer experiencing the landscape. Two people share one consciousness and, together, manufacture a third thing.

There is no room for the landscape in a landscape painting; it must be violently ripped out to make room for the third thing. Only the viewer can turn it back into nature.

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Essay continued

Spartina 3, 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

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Night Crawler 2, 2021, oil on paper, 22.5 x 30 inches

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Pond Sheathed in Ice, 2019, oil on linen, 58 x 48 inches

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The Carolina coast taught me how to break down the landscape into composite parts and relate those parts to the human body. For instance, the foreground is visceral and immediate, my sneakers on the mud. Middle ground is farther away; I could easily walk there but first must visualize being there in my mind. Background is farthest away, so I must project myself there in my imagination. Three layers of spatial information are compressed into a single view. The greater the distance, the more it is internalized, because I have to imagine being there while standing here. Content in my work is a function of how near or far away something appears from your face. This is why I emphasize the texture of paint.

As Bob Dylan wrote, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” When I fling paint at the canvas, it splats. If I add thinner, it runs. If one color appears to pass over another, it’s because it actually does. There are no tricks. Painting is an experimental act which uses artifice to comment on the strangeness of reality. There is no such thing as a nature painting; every painting is a studio painting when contemplated. To paint the landscape you must sit with your back to the window.

Artist Charles Hawthorne wrote, “Painting is just like making an after-dinner speech. If you want to be remembered, say one thing and stop.” I do one thing. Every painting I make begins and ends with the same image, a tree trunk and its shadow; that immovable marking of location. A tree and its shadow say, “This is here.” By paying attention and drawing them in detail with pencil on paper, I respond, “I am here.” The reason I draw a tree is not to make it appear but vanish. Each carefully rendered leaf and strand of bark nudges me further from visible reality into a crafted one, leaving me both depleted and supplied.

As I walk around the tree, that which was hidden gradually reveals itself. Like any journey, as soon as you take your first step you’ve abandoned your starting point. Travel eliminates its origins. As Gertrude Stein wrote, “Whenever you get there, there is no there.” Painting is like walking up a “down” escalator; you stay in the same spot; it’s the stairs that move.

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Essay continued

Reeds Rise 3, 2021, oil on linen, 56 x 79 inches

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It took me decades to realize that I only paint foregrounds. Every time I add a skin of color, the previous layer moves into the background. I don’t want my viewer to gaze at a landscape view but feel as if they’ve been spun around and are inside it. This unnatural way of seeing brings to mind medieval artists who existed inside the pictorial world that they created as opposed to Renaissance artists who used perspective to stand outside the world being represented, as if peering through a window.

In the Middle Ages nature was believed to have been created by God for man and woman, therefore nature was subordinate to man and woman. Likewise, medieval art didn’t perceive objects as existing in the same space; each thing was a separate entity; an image was more significant than “making it look realistic”. The essence was enough. Medieval artists had no need for suggesting deep pictorial space or material volume. The flat surface wasn’t a physical limitation, it was the whole point. Flatness represented a realm of spiritual awareness in which figure and ground were compressed into patterns that were sometimes interchangeable. If you see the figure, then it comes forward. If you see the background, then it comes forward. What you see is what matters.

Human beings make art so that we have an excuse to stare at each other. By peering into someone else’s heart, we gain a stronger purchase on our own. I don’t want to stand in front of an idea but a thing that exists separate from me, constructed for the sole purpose of contemplation. A painting can’t function without the physical presence of the viewer just as wind chimes can’t function without a breeze. The act of bringing oneself to an object that exists outside oneself is an act of self-compassion because, in that moment, the artist and viewer twist nervous systems around one another and manufacture a place that wasn’t there before. I think that’s a beautiful way to live.

I’m always a little embarrassed when looking at a painting because the feelings that I thought were my own were really those of someone else. I recognize them. That’s what great art does. It makes us recognize what we’ve never seen before. An eye not told what to see sees more. There is nothing more disappointing than a painting that tries to provoke a certain response.

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Quality depends on your mental point of view, not your moral point of view. Pleasure is itself, knowledge. Mary Oliver wrote a poem about a grasshopper; Charles Schultz wrote an entire comic strip about Linus discovering his tongue; The Beatles wrote a song about a Yellow Submarine; and Vincent van Gogh painted Almond Blossoms. Like Samuel, those artists weren’t begging to be “understood” or trying to outsmart everyone else in the room. They were simply saying: Hey, over here. I have something to show you. Art has to point some place. Samuel is gone now, but I still sit beside him on that park bench in my dreams. We don’t speak. The pigeons are enough.

- Brian Rutenberg, New York City

Spartina 5, 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

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Night Crawler 3, 2021, oil on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches

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Banner of the Coast 5, 2021, oil on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches

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Shade, 2021, oil on linen, 40 x 60 inches

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My Blanket of Shadows, 2019, oil on linen, 48 x 58 inches

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Reeds Rise I, 2021, oil on linen, 60 x 82 inches

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Banner of the Coast 3, 2021, oil on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches

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Red Creek, 2021, oil on linen, 66 x 52 inches

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Spell 3, 2020, oil on linen, 56 x 79 inches

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Spartina 2, 2021, oil on linen, 40 x 30 inches

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Spartina 4, 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

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Banner of the Coast 4, 2021, oil on paper, 22.5 x 30 inches

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Green Goddess 3, 2021, oil on linen, 66 x 40 inches

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Reeds Rise 4, 2021, oil on linen, 40 x 66 inches

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Green Goddess 2, 2021, oil on linen, 40 x 60 inches

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Green Goddess, 2021, oil on linen, 38 x 72 inches

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Spartina, 2021, oil on linen, 40 x 30 inches

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Reeds Rise 2, 2021, oil on linen, 56 x 79 inches

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Reeds Rise 5, 2021, oil on linen, 40 x 60 inches

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Brian Rutenberg

(b. 1965, South Carolina )

EDUCATION 1989 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY 1987 BFA, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Reeds Rise, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Birmingham, MI

Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC (also 2021, 2018,

2012, 2009, 2006, 2004, 2003) 2020 Forum Gallery, New York, NY (also 2017, 2014, 2011, 2008,

2005, 2002) 2019 Lake, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2017 Clear Seeing Place, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI 2016 Peter Marcelle Project, Southampton, NY

Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI 2015 TEW Gallery, Atlanta, GA (also 2011, 2009) 2014 Cotuit Center for the Arts, Cotuit, MA 2012 Toomey-Tourell Gallery, San Francisco, CA (also 2008, 2006,

2004, 2000) 2011 Franklin G. Burroughs - Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum,

Myrtle Beach, SC

The Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA 2009 Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC 2007 Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC

Galerie Timothy Tew, Atlanta, GA 2006 South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, SC 2004 Cress Gallery of Art, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga,

TN 2003 John Raimondi Gallery, Vitale, Caturano & Co., Boston, MA

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Tippy-Stern Fine Art, Charleston, SC (also 2000) The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Colorado Springs, CO Butler Institute of American Art, Warren, OH Hidell-Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland Schmidt-Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (also 1997) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Gallery, Toronto, Canada Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC Burroughs-Chapin Museum of Art, Myrtle Beach, SC University of South Carolina-Beaufort, SC Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, NY (also 1995, 1993) Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, SC National Library of Canada, Glenn Gould Exhibition Website, Ottawa, Canada Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, MI Fridholm Gallery, Asheville, NC (also 1993, 1992) Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, NC Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY Burroughs-Chapin Museum of Art, Myrtle Beach, SC Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA Naples Art Museum, Naples, FL Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA St. John’s Museum of Art, Wilmington, NC Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH SELECTED AWARDS 2018 Commencement Speaker and Honorary Doctorate, College of

Charleston, SC 2004 Fellowship in Painting, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) 2000 Peter S. Reed Foundation Award 1997 Fulbright Scholarship

Artists Work Programme Studio Grant, Irish Museum of Modern Art 1991 Basil Alkazzi Award USA

Ragdale Foundation Fellowship 1988 MFA Scholarship Award, School of Visual Arts 1987 Laura Bragg Memorial Award

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com © 2021 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC Artwork © Brian Rutenberg

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