Under the Pines 8, 2020, oil on paper, 22½" x 30"
LewAllen Galleries is proud to represent the beautiful and complex intuitions about the natural world that are Brian Rutenberg’s dazzling responses to nature as expressed on canvas. For more than four decades, Rutenberg has made art that enthusiastically embraces the beauty of nature while unabashedly asserting the sheer lusciousness of paint and color. His works meld the seen and the imagined in masterful combinations of visual grandeur that engage the eye with pleasure and touch the soul with joy.
Rutenberg paints the landscape with utter physical immediacy and immersion in a manner that integrates the visceral and the intellectual. The artist refers to his paintings as “sustained meditations on the sheer transformative power of looking.” Indeed, for him, the landscape remains a powerful impulse more than a particular subject matter.
In creating his art, Rutenberg extracts structures and colors of landscape and reassembles them into his own painterly universe, with its own natural laws about color and texture. These vibrant and energetically choreographed combinations of color and light assert themselves with an idiosyncratic muscularity that bursts forward from the surfaces of his canvases and excite the gaze and refresh the mind. Indeed, with their wonderful vibrancy and luminous clarity, these paintings have the remarkable capacity to feel like the visual equivalence of the joy of being in nature has been achieved. What an amazing accomplishment.
Kenneth R. Marvel— Zora Neale Hurston (1891– 1960) Black American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker who portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South
I need me some Leon Kosoff. Now there’s a sentence that has never been uttered. Part of the charm of my teacher, Michael Tyzack of the College of Charleston, was that he personally knew many of the painters who interested me when I was poring through books about English landscape painting as a college freshman in 1984. Born in Sheffield in 1933, Michael studied at London’s Slade School of Art under Victor Pasmore, Lucien Freud, and Sir William Coldstream. He was a member of 56 Group Wales, a coterie of painters dedicated to promoting modernist Welsh art, and raised pints with some of Britain’s most important artists from Francis Bacon to Stanley Spencer to David Hockney. However, one name that came up often was Leon Kosoff.
Known, along with Frank Auerbach, for creating images from gooey ropes of oil paint, Kosoff’s subject matter ranged from portraits to landscapes. However, I was obsessed with his obsession for Christ Church, Spitalfields. Erected in 1723-29, Christ Church is faced in cream-white Portland stone and is strategically situated between the City of London and the East End. Kosoff spent his early years in Spitalfields and, in 1985, began drawing and painting the church, a visual inquiry that lasted the rest of his life. I love when an artist returns again and again to one subject, a single motif, and extracts the maximum poetry from that self-imposed restriction (witness Monet’s Rouen Cathedral or Minnie Evans’ Airlie Gardens
in Wilmington, NC). Artists are under constant pressure to grow and evolve, however there is great poetry in repetition, in doing the same thing over and over. That’s how you get good at stuff. No one talks about that. Duke Ellington said, “The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.”
Art thrives on its limitations. When teachers said to me that art was “Whatever I wanted it to be,” I felt bummed for days. That’s how you speak to a child. Freedom isn’t doing anything you want, but everything you can within walls. The Beatles, Bonnie Raitt, and Judas Priest all begin with the same song structure: intro/verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus/ bridge/chorus. What makes them great artists is how they flood those restrictions with soul and introspection. Painter Philip Guston said it best, “Would you be as interested in seeing men fly, unattached and free, as you would be in seeing a man with, I don’t know, two hundred pounds of cement strapped onto him and see him get two inches off the ground?” Georges Braque said, “I don’t do as I want, I do as I can.” Painting is a vehicle for truth and beauty, but an experienced painter doesn’t aim for such things. If you intend to “create beauty”, then you’ll probably end up with attractiveness. Likewise, if you reject beauty, then you’re still screwed; just as a door is a barrier, no matter on which side you stand. I replaced trying to create beauty with pride in craftsmanship long ago. If it looks good, it is good.
Robert Rauschenberg said it best: “You begin with the possibilities of the material.” The reason I emphasize the physicality of my materials is to connect the painting to the tactile world that we all occupy. When I throw a fistful of vermillion at the canvas, it splats; if I add thinner, it runs, and one color appears to pass over another because it really does. Think of colors as a pack of playing cards dumped out on a table, a pile of overlapping layers, some visible and others partially concealed. I spend all day stacking color. My oil paintings are sometimes up to three inches thick; a technique that is called impasto. I dislike thick paint for the sake of thick paint. There is no such thing as texture in painting; lumps and ridges are merely the evidence of a working brush. I don’t use thick paint out of passion or bravado, but to establish spatial orientation: thick is near and thin is far away. Content in my work is a direct function of how near or far away something appears from your face.
A painting should grow like a living, breathing thing in which the ideas come out of the process. Starting with an idea and building a picture around it automatically inserts a gap between the artist and viewer because the artist knows something that the viewer doesn’t. Even if they figure it out, the gap remains. I want my paintings to begin and end with physical certainties like materials and process; anyone can relate to a buttery brushstroke because it doesn’t need to be anything other than a buttery brushstroke. The smaller the gap, the better the painting. For example, consider the still-lives of William Bailey and Giorgio Morandi. Both artists created paintings of exquisite attentiveness, however Morandi always distresses me because he’s removed the gap between the image and us. The Bailey hasn’t. It says, “Look at me. I’m a picture.” But the Morandi s ays, “I’m not a picture. I am real bottles.” This has nothing to do with accurate representation, Morandi’s bottles are clumsy and artificial yet they exude a fierce lucidity because there is no space between the intent and execution. Oil paint isn’t used in the service of the image, it is the image. The subject is bottles but the content is the sheer joy of wakefulness. Painting enacts place. Where is our place? With the Bailey, we stand behind him and peer through a window into an illusory space at objects previously seen. With Morandi, we stand in his shoes and see through his eyes at objects whose only function is to be seen. We twist our nervous systems around his and together manufacture a third thing, crafting a place and discovering it simultaneously. Sometimes the truth isn’t discovered, it’s manufactured.
I ’ve never needed a position because I have a place. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where I was born and raised, is a resort town full of amusement parks and arcades buzzing with neon signs and blinking candy-colored lights surrounded by some of the most ravishing landscapes on the East Coast. The fullness and amplitude of my resort upbringing gave me a deep love for excess; moderation simply isn’t in my vocabulary. As the South Carolina painter J. Bardin o nce told me, “Don’t treat colored glass as if it’s clear.” There is transcendent beauty in the slow-moving water of Lowcountry rivers, but artificial landscapes rinsed in nickel and neon are equally beautiful. I paid attention. It’s a full-time job overlooking what’s plain to see. Two landscapes, one natural and one artificial, were colliding head-on at breakneck speed, secreting a liquid that was bright and
combustible. That liquid has been the jet fuel for my paintings for four and a half decades. Forcing two places that didn’t go together, together, made me a painter.
Other than painting, two of my favorite things in the world are barbecue and magic, both of which can be found at amusement parks and state fairs. As a teenager, I admired the local artists who painted carnival banners for their design acumen, clarity of intention, and purposeful execution. Whether for the Ten in One show, the Pie Eating C ontest, or The Human Cannonball, each banner was a concise visual description not of what will happen, but of what could happen. It was as if reality had been questioned, reexamined, and improved through the process of exaggeration and ornamentation. I titled many of these new paintings “Banners of the Coast” to address how images displayed in the carnivals of my childhood created a formal familiarity in my memory and, from that visual rolodex, manufacture an aesthetic that intensifies a specific, local experience through the marriage of sense and sight. Copying those banners as teenager taught me that, if you are going to impinge on someone’s consciousness, even for a second, you have to grab them by the earlobes with a composition that looks good from twenty-five feet away. Many of these new paintings feature large, bold forms at the edges quickly shifting to atmospheric space near the center which is punctuated by percussive flecks of intense color. I also learned this from Dutch Seventeenth Century painters like Philips Koninck and Jacob van Ruisdael who used carefully placed masses of dark and light value and low sight lines to pull the gaze inward towards the center. The result is an inverted landscape, as if it were being viewed through the wide end of a telescope in which the whole view is compressed down to the size of a diamond and shot directly into the retina.
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. Here was the whole of a view, not from above looking down, but from a mollusk’s vantage point, a million miles close.
Seeing from a bug’s-eye view instantly compresses space, like closing an accordion, and makes the viewer complicit in reconstructing t he landscape; I provide the close-up and the far away, and the viewer supplies the middle.
I’ve come to realize that my paintings would not have been possible thirty years ago; I had neither the skill nor the circumspection that comes with age. Plus, I’ve been away from my subject for more than half of my life because I choose to live in a city (New York) that has amplified my treatment of light and space. When you put all of those things together, what you get are paintings that belong to their place. To paint one landscape, again and again, is to paint all landscapes. Addressing one person at a time, addresses all people. One place, fully grasped, helps us grasp all places. I paint because I can never see enough places. So, I return to one. I don’t paint South Carolina, I manufacture a place, and South Carolina becomes it.
Brian Rutenberg New York City, March 2023Utterance, 2016
Tempest Tells Me, 2023 Oil on linen, 53 x 68 inches
Clambank, 2023
Oil on linen, 36 x 55 inches
River Driver 8, 2023
Oil on paper, 30 x 23 inches
1989 M FA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
1987 B FA, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC
2023 B anners of the Coast, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
2021 Reeds Rise, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Birmingham, MI
Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC (also 2018, 2012, 200 9, 2006, 2004, 2003)
2020 Forum Gallery, New York, NY (also 2017, 2014, 2011, 200 8, 2005, 2002)
2019 Lake, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
2017 Clear Seeing Place, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
S aginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI
2016 Peter Marcelle Project, Southampton, NY
B annister 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, 200 6, 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, S C
2007 Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC
Galerie Timothy Tew, Atlanta, GA
2006 South Carolina St ate Museum, Columbia, SC
2004 Cress Gallery of Art, University of Tennessee–Chatt anooga, TN
2003 John Raimondi Gallery, Vitale, Caturano & Co., Boston, MA
2002 Tippy-Stern Fine Art, Charleston, SC (also 2000)
The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Colorado Springs, C O
2001 Butler Institute of American Art, Warren, OH
Hidell-Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC
2000 Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
Schmidt-Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (also 1997)
1999 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC
1998 Burroughs-Chapin Museum of Art, Myrtle Beach, SC
University of South Carolina-Beaufort, S C
1996 Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, NY (also 1995, 1993)
Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, SC
National Library of Canada, Glenn Gould Exhibition Website, Ott awa, Canada
1995 Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC
1994 David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, MI
Fridholm Gallery, Asheville, NC (also 1993, 1992)
1993 Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, S C
2018 Commencement Speaker and Honorary Doctorate, College of Charleston, S C
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
19 91 B asil Alkazzi Award USA
Ragdale Foundation Fellowship
1988 M FA Scholarship Award, School of Visual Arts
1987 Laura Bragg Memorial Award
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
Courtesy Brian Rutenberg Studios
Orchard 4, 2017, oil on linen, 34" x 50"