Thank you to everyone at The Duke Endowment for making this exquisite project possible. Brian Rutenberg's sublime painting THE WILD SOUTH is installed at The Duke Endowment's headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.
THE WILD SOUTH
ARTIST STATEMENT BY BRIAN RUTENBERG
“The only problem with art is mosquitoes,” I said as I wiped away my sweat mustache and sharpened a 5B pencil. That’s everything you need to know about my paintings. There is humidity, mud, season, time of day, and even sound. There is a location but not a description. By forcing two unrelated things together (art and mosquitoes), you and I share a moment of telepathy because the image starts in my imagination and finishes in yours, allowing us to craft a place and discover it simultaneously. I’ve never needed a position because I have a place.
Before I learned to paint, I practiced drawing live oak trees in the South Carolina Lowcountry. I am still practicing. My ritual is simple. I sit in the buggy grass and copy what’s in front of me. I don’t make anything up. There is no symbolism in a tree; a branch is a branch, and a leaf is a leaf. What you see is what’s there. What’s there is what matters. Rubbing a No. 5B pencil on cream paper catapults me seven hundred and seventy-seven miles from the cut-throat New York art world. There is no anxiety of influence, formalist dialectic, or theoretical constructs, just clear and present information: me, a tree, and bugs. As my teacher William Halsey at the College of Charleston advised, “You have to see the obvious thing before you cansee the superhuman thing.” Humidity made me a painter.
Just what is it about the South? You never hear the term “Northern Art”. It would be easy for me to say “You had to be born there,” buts that’s wrong because the job of a Southern artist is to make the place come alive precisely for people who weren’t born there. I grew up in landscapes so hauntingly beautiful that it was unbearable. As a kid, I believed that I could see the languid air that stuck to my eyelids and hung like curtains at dusk. The South spawns many writers and artists because it's so damn hot, and heat makes people crazy. Some artists seek inspiration in her languorous scenery, while others surrender to humidity's curfew and allow their eyes to be torched by untamed light. That's the difference between a landscape painter and a Southern landscape painter; a Southern landscape painter extracts poetry from capitulation. An artist is born the moment he or she gives up. By painting one landscape, again and again, a Southern artist paints all landscapes. By addressing one person at a time, a Southern artist addresses all people. One place, fully grasped, helps us grasp all places. Some painters are masters of the universe while others manufacture an entire galaxy in a teacup.
American regionalist painters from the twenties through the fifties were guided by what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to as “local knowledge” and based much of their philosophy on the belief that “To know a city is to know its streets”, a phrase that immediately came to mind when thinking about this fabulous commission. With its enduring commitment toenriching lives and communities in North and South Carolina, The Duke Endowment is the embodiment of local knowledge in service of the very region from which it was born. My task was to give visual form to such knowledge.
I began with the obvious thing, the paint itself. There is nothing more local than standing in front of thick sensuous oil paint. Painting is the most empathetic art form because when you stand in front of a painting you stand in the exact same spot that the painter did as he or she applied each thin skin of color. Two people, maker and taker, twist nervous systems around one another and manufacture a third nervous system. My subject is that third thing. All of my landscape paintings refer to standing in one season peering ahead into another, longing for October in May. The Western eye is trained to read from left to right. Therefore, I compose with this lateral span in mind. Just like my tree studies, my landscape paintings don't rely on linear perspective to establish pictorial depth but are more akin to Egyptian friezes in which a wide entablature is decorated with reliefs rhythmically arranged across shallow space. However, rather than a panoramic view from static vantage point, I want your gaze to travel across the terrain as if you're actually wandering the Carolinas from the hills of the upstate to opalescent lakes of the midlands to willows gathering river haze along the coast.
The title “The Wild South” has double meaning. First, it alludes to the last line of Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Second, it is an homage to nineteenth century Romantic painter Washington Allston (1779-1843) who was born in Georgetown, SC, forty minutes from where I am from. Allston credits his lowcountry roots for fostering “a stronger love for the wild and marvelous”, referring to the same tangled woods I explored as a kid. My intention was to bend those remembered reveries through the lens of American romanticism with its feeling for shadow, antiquity, mystery, and the picturesque. The one constant that brings everything to life is touch.
Long before I knew what an artist was, I’d scoop up fistfuls of pluff mud, splat them on the dock under the savage sun and carefully arrange torn bits of colored paper across the muck, followed by another handful of mud. The frond-lipped tip of an oyster shell was an ideal tool for skimming the translucent slime to reveal jeweled flashes of color of varying intensity depending on how hard or lightly I pressed. I did it again and again. Everything I needed was under my feet. It took decades to recognize how much the directness and sensuality of those experiences taught me about the way a painting comes into being. Oil paint is crushed rock mixed with liquified fat and smeared on cloth stretched over a wooden support. A painting isn’t created; it’s made. My earliest heroes weren’t artists I read about in books but locals who made things: shrimpers with shoulders globed from years of trawling, the wizard in Myrtle Square Mall who carved hand-dipped candles into lemony curls, and singing women purling sweetgrass into baskets, masterfully doing what the hand knows. They taught me that beauty lies not in the making but in it having been made. Someone loved me enough to have made these things for me to see and, because they paid exquisite attention to detail, to intent and execution, it means they had a high opinion of all of us. I think that’s a beautiful way to live. It has taken me forty-nine years of painting to see the obvious thing. Painting enacts place. I don’t paint South Carolina. I manufacture a place and South Carolina becomes it.
-Brian Rutenberg, New York City
