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This Week

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Talking pictures Santa Barbara County painter Henry Rasmussen opens eyes to injustice [8]

BY ASHLEY SCHWELLENBACH

PHOTO COURTESY HENRY RASMUSSEN

Artist, with work: Henry Rasmussen displays his paintings of the past five years

ANARCHY

Expressive

BY ASHLEY SCHWELLENBACH

squeegee

A Santa Barbara painter fills the walls of the Steynberg Gallery

I

f Santa Barbara painter Henry Rasmussen’s canvases could talk they’d have an odd pack of stories to tell—of being perforated with an old pen, brushed with acrylics and oil sticks, spray painted, splashed with thinner, squeegeed, sanded and scraped, sewn into, and carved with a kitchen knife. It’s a fairly violent working method for an artist whose work of the past few years has literally proclaimed the mantra “live and let live.”

The paintings on display at the Steynberg Gallery through May 26 represent bits and pieces of the various series he’s worked on since he started painting seriously about five years ago.

Before that, Rasmussen founded and edited a fine art photography magazine called Black & White. He transitioned into painting when he sold the magazine and built himself a studio, an amenity that he insists poses an important advantage for artists. Going back farther still, he began a typography apprenticeship in Stockholm at the age of 16, and completed his education as a typographer at a German foundry called Bauersche Giesserie.

His interest in typography is especially evident in his artwork, which almost always features nearly illegible, graffiti-like text, sometimes scrawled on top of a forehead or peace sign, sometimes fading under the weight of additional paint layers. He uses the words to create tension, though they are incorporated seamlessly with images.

“Letters and words and characters are incredibly important,” he explained. “The letters have two meanings.

You can form words or you can think of the shape of the words. Just like a figurative painter would use figures

to express things. The message is superior to the artistic expression.”

Born into a Seventh Day Adventist family in Denmark, Rasmussen never received a formal education in the arts.

When he was 14 years old his parents enrolled him in an art class, but after about three sessions they realized that he was drawing from a nude female model and withdrew him from the class. His family’s devoutness, coupled with recent political strife, would inspire an entire series of paintings that comment on organized religion.

The first series on exhibit at the Steynberg—“Cry For Me Argentina”—is based on photographs Rasmussen took while on vacation in Argentina, specifically San Telmo, the oldest barrio of Buenos Aires.

“I’ve always photographed walls because I thought they were beautiful,” said Rasmussen. But the walls in Buenos Aires had a more complicated component—graffiti made by Argentineans expressing their pain, loss, and anger over The Dirty War, which took place roughly between 1976 and 1983 and resulted in the deaths and disappearances of thousands.

One of Rasmussen’s paintings, heavily layered with acrylic, spray paint, color pencil, and oil stick asks, in huge red letters, “Donde esta Luciano Arruga.” The final word fades into the background until it is almost illegible, almost disappears the way 16-year-old Arruga disappeared on Jan. 31, 2009. Like most of Rasmussen’s work, the painting is not a single effort, but four or five, with layers of paint invisible beneath the uppermost painting. Some layers managed to survive the onslaught and peek bravely out at the world in

IMAGES BY HENRY RASMUSSEN

PASION DE MULTITUDES

patches and lines. But Rasmussen credits even the invisible layers beneath with shaping and improving the final piece.

On another canvas with a bold red and black background that evokes the pits of hell, Rasumssen scrawled “Nunca Mas” (no more) over and over, until even a single word of the plea is no longer legible. Some have faces, crying or blindfolded. Others are painted on wood panels doctored to look like the corrugated metal paneling where the graffiti was discovered. His goal was to avoid making the entire series in a homogenous style that would make it difficult to differentiate one painting from another.

Another series, also exploring the significance of strife in a foreign country, is “Fall of the Wall.” Rasmussen first lit upon the idea for the seven-painting series while putting together an exhibit at the HP Garcia Gallery in New York for the autumn of 2009, which also happened to be the 20-year anniversary of the decommissioning of the Berlin Wall.

Continuing his previous tradition of pairing graffiti with the occasional figure and face, Rasmussen’s “Fall of the Wall” paintings contain such messages as “Ich bin ein Berliner,” “Tear down this wall,” and “Make love, not war.” The first of these is painted against a somewhat abstract German flag background, of black, red, and yellow color blocks stacked atop one another.

When painting text for several of his “Fall of the Wall” paintings, Rasmussen reversed

any of these.”

His initial attempts to abandon both words and text were failures. Somehow, something always crept in. Once the phrase “Beat 82” appeared in a painting, though Rasmussen hadn’t a clue what it meant. He’s also adding multi-dimensional elements, rope and metal mesh in the case of a 2009 painting titled “Wo Man Hood” in his “The Cross and the Double-Cross” series. He adorned a painting of a nude woman with 48 silk roses, and drove nails into a canvas with four hearts, titled “Progressive Heart Failure.”

When Rasmussen realized that he could thin acrylic paint, he switched from oils.

And though he initially had no interest in using a paintbrush, he acknowledges that he has used the tool in his recent painting forays. To him, his penchant for lesser-used materials isn’t all that novel. Willem de Kooning used sandpaper as well, he points out. His restless appropriation of new tools is simply part of a greater artistic search, a way of becoming a better artist, of capturing and communicating an elusive feeling.

Part of building a respected body of work means carefully assessing what’s worthy of inclusion, for Rasmussen at least.

“Let’s say I’m walking through a field of flowers and I’m picking a bouquet. I see some flowers do not belong in my bouquet so I discard them,” he explains. “I did a few in a series of hearts. I will discard them.” He calls the hearts cheap, though they were painted

Talking ABESINOS LEGALES, NUNCA MAS

IMAGES BY HENRY RASMUSSEN

CONTRA TODA POLICIA

WO MAN HOOD

the text. He planned to have mirrors hanging from the gallery ceiling so that viewers could read the painting’s text through the mirror.

“You can’t look into the mirror without looking at yourself,” said Rasmussen, both saddling his viewer with a degree of personal accountability, and encouraging empathy.

Though the Steynberg Gallery has several distinct exhibit spaces, gallery owner Peter Steynberg divided Rasmussen’s paintings into two sections—his “Cry For Me Argentina” pieces, represented by a dozen paintings, and “Live and Let Live,” which encompasses works from several different series including “Fall of the Wall” and “The Cross and the Double-Cross.” Though Rasmussen didn’t paint an entire series called “live and let live,” he has scrawled the adage onto various paintings, calling it “one of the great mottos of life.”

“If we all lived by ‘live and let live’ we wouldn’t have religious and political fighting,” he added.

The artist works extremely rapidly, motivated perhaps by his late start as a painter.

“When you start painting this late, many collectors think ‘What can this guy do in the future?’” he acknowledged. But Rasmussen does have an idea of where he’d like to go, and what he wants to leave behind. “I am in the process of trying to leave the words and the letters and the graffiti because I feel there is more mystery in an image that doesn’t have

graffiti

Henry Rasmussen’s “Visual Voices” are on display at the Steynberg Gallery through May 26. The Steynberg Gallery is located at 1531 Monterey St. in SLO. For more information visit steynberggallery.com.

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR with the same quality as his other works.

If Rasmussen’s paintings could talk, and it’s not a stretch to argue that they do, they’d ponder and lament the fates of the disappeared and the divided. They’d plead for peace and understanding. They’d demonstrate that graffiti has its own social purpose, and nothing, not even the butter knife sitting quietly in the silverware drawer, is beyond or below art. m Ashley Schwellenbach is Arts Editor of New Times, the Santa Maria Sun’s sister paper. Send comments to aschwellenbach@ newtimesslo.com.