Painting Cavan Light

 

In the New York gallery circuit, the talk is of places that hold a special meaning for the artist – where early inspiration was nurtured or lagging creativity is restored. The list is predictable: Andalusia is there, so is Tuscany and Provence. Santa Fe is in the mix too. And Cavan.

    Cavan? That lowly Irish border county artistically celebrated, it seems, only in dark Irish dramas of rejection and revenge.

    But if reality is really only about perception, Brian Rutenberg's perception of Cavan is almost literally an eye-opener. And the story of how and why he got to Cavan is equally revealing. 

    Brian grew up 'a few blocks from the ocean' in the coastal resort town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (not then the centre of a thriving Irish 'summer-jobbing' community that it is today).

  His family had no particular artistic leanings, though his father, an attorney, is also a poet who has always appreciated the South Carolina landscapes and marshes away from the garish seafront thoroughfares. It was on these parent-led explorations that Brian got his first inkling of an artistic instinct.

    By 14, he could see patterns that others missed in the effects of light on bodies of water, and in the framing of light by tree branches.

    'I was beginning to see abstract patterns, beginning to appreciate negative space and all of the complexities that came with it,' he says.

    He proved to be a natural draughtsman, and from an early age his seriousness and diligence about art impressed his parents. 

    Family visits to Charleston, 120 miles to the south, had given him a sense of visual scale and architectural detail. 

    'I knew already that there was a connection between good living and good art and so there was no contest when it came to choosing a place to study.' It had to be Charleston.

    He was helped by the fact that the College of Charleston, which he entered in 1983, had an unusually diverse art faculty. It included William Halsey, an acknowledged expert on abstract painting, and artist-lecturers such as Michael Tyzack (a British graduate of the Slade school), Michael Phillips and Barbara Duval.

    'From the beginning, they gave me a great amount of freedom', Brian continues. 'I had one of the handful of individual studio spaces available to students, and I set up a working relationship which basically consisted of me doing whatever I wanted to, and asking questions when I needed to.'

    It also helped that the approach at the College of Charleston was multi-disciplinary. Art students had access to other areas of creative endeavor, including stage set design, where Brian worked on a theatrical production for Robert Ivey, the famed ballet director. 

    That involvement also gave him an outlet for his interest in music, and particularly for the solo piano, around which he has built a formidable insight into the work and spirit of Canadian virtuoso Glenn Gould, who died in 1982 at the age of 50.

    He likes and quotes repeatedly  Gould's statement that the purpose of art is 'the gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity', relayed via a direct line of communication between artist and public.

Brian expresses it formally thus in a catalog note: 'I have always believed that a painting can serve as a canopy under which the identity and feelings of the artist can meet and blur with those of the viewer through the sheer transformative power of looking – no other medium can bind together the fabric of seeing more sensually or mysteriously'.

    In these college years of intense experimentation Brian worked with diverse materials to find his metier, building swirling abstract semi-sculptural effects around realistic depictions of baroque figures inspired by Bernini. 

    'Sometimes I would work through the night and by morning would have draped the college circulation areas with massive paintings that covered wall, ceiling and floor space,' he remembers.

    Already, however, he was looking for the historical source of the abstraction that he loved – the origins of the spiralling patterns that he saw in art, representing water, sky and landscape as light affected them, communicating fertility, rejuvenation, metamorphosis, transformation, transcendence. 

    Book research told him that the Celts had been in at the beginning, grappling with these elemental entities and expressing them in circular patterns on stone and metal. 

    He also knew that the purest forms of Celtic artistic insight had flourished in the island of  Ireland, where they had developed untainted by the Roman influences that affected Britain and mainland Europe.

Now he had a goal: get to Ireland. But first there was the matter of an artistic 'finishing school' – the School of Visual Arts in New York City in its Master of Fine Arts program.

    During his two years at SVA, Brian continued his unanguished search, often using acres of cheap cardboard to bear the heavy oilings of his three-dimensional style as it became profounder in its abstraction and more wide-ranging in its experimentation.

    At the end of the 1980s, he came back to the south to exhibit, mounting a first solo show of almost installation-like intensity at Francis Marion College in Florence S.C., and also showing at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

 In his first three years as an independent artist, Brian had the advantage of a studio grant that allowed him to work in a spacious and sympathetic environment in the Tribeca section of New York (he still works in the same building today).

   He built up toward his first gallery show at the Cavin Morris Gallery in 1993 by focusing on water as a medium of fertility and rejuvenation, as a reflector of light, and as a bordering surface 'between two co-existent places, one dry and real above, the other liquid and imaginary below', as he would later describe it.  Inspired by the strangely-named rivers of the Carolinas, the exhibition sold out before it opened and was reviewed favorably in Art in America. 

    Two years later, a second show took its inspiration jointly from Glenn Gould and Richard Strauss, whose 'Four Last Songs' formed the theme. 'I wanted to work with the idea that the artistic experience can be pushed to transcend the individual brushstroke and the individual note so to achieve ecstasy in solitude - as Strauss and Gould believed,' Brian says. 

    His experimentation continued as well – 'at one time I began puncturing my paintings to achieve an additional depth into which the viewer could project him or herself to test the physical boundaries between viewer and artwork', he remembers.

    But as his artistic style settled and became more assured, the ambition for an exploration of Ireland lingered. Brian knew that the La Tene period of Celtic artistry, with its great spiralling loops and ovals, encircling and defining and changing to represent the elemental movements of earth and humanity, must be the focus of his attention.

   'I began to read contemporary Irish  literature – Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney – and to study the work of 19th. century Irish painters like Sir John Lavery, William Leech, Roderic O'Connor, and Frank O'Meara, particularly in their approach to tonality and use of light'.

    In 1996, a friend told him about the Fulbright Scholarship Program, noting however that the program administrators were more used to dealing with Ireland-bound literary types than practitioners of the visual arts.  

    But Brian had little trouble convincing them of his potential, and Ireland, with the relatively recent Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and a thriving modern art scene, was more than  ready to receive him.

    As well as studio space at IMMA, he had introductions to the Dublin artistic community and invitations to speak at art schools. 

    His most sacred excursions were towards the county of Meath, where Newgrange and Knowth and Dowth are the stunning examples of the Celts way with art and science. There they created great symbolic decorated chambers to trap, fracture and distribute the mystical light in patterns that have endured through the millenia.

    And then one week-end, on the advice of an artist friend whose husband came from the county, he visited Cavan. He knew there were lakes there, certainly. But what he had not bargained for was (as he describes it in a catalog note) 'buttery hills, skies blurring into grass, water melting into earth, and fragrant and ancient fields brimming with light and color.

    'I was filled with ideas and immediately set them to drawings and watercolors which would evolve into finished oil paintings in my studio'.

    His inspiration was enriched by the humility of his approach.  He would take a bus to Cavan, then rent a bike and set off until he found a spot – near Redhills or Belturbet or Scotshouse or Butlersbridge – and settle down to paint. 

    Or he would hitch-hike, and find himself of an evening around a family table in deepest rural Cavan explaining what he was about to an awe-struck audience.  'No matter how difficult the communication, I always felt that the Irish had the advantage of at least knowing what the issue of identity was,' he says.

    Occasionally the success or emotion of the interchange called for a deeper recognition, and now at least one Cavan family has an original Rutenberg on its walls.

    The pictures that emerged from this experience are, in the main, small, very abstract, almost sculptural in the layering of their oils, full of modulated greens and browns, with the occasional clamoring of reds and blues.                Brian describes them as 'intimate sketch-book-sized paintings just big enough for one face, two eyes at a time'. 

    'I have begun to introduce more recognisable elements of line for horizons and trees, but the oval continues to be the most obvious element, representing the Celtic symbolism of metamorphosis and transformation – two powerful basic components of identity,' he says.

    He was very gratified by the response of both critics and the viewing public when the 'Cavan paintings' were exhibited in both of his influential early locations - Charleston and Dublin. 

    But despite critical attention in the United States that has mentioned him as a possible successor to the  great Southern painter Jasper Johns,  and a ten-year retrospective in 2001 by the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, he remains unaffected and open.

    He lives in New York with his wife Kathryn, a medical doctor, art historian and former ballet dancer from Portland, Oregon.

    He retains strong connections with his roots, in terms of both both family and cultural influences – his two brothers (one a lawyer, the other teaching biology in Florida) have also developed strong artistic sensibilities. 

He continues with what he freely admits is his Glenn Gould 'obsession', visiting Toronto to sit meditatively across the street from the apartment building where the pianist used to live, and research the Gould Archive in Ottawa.

Artistically he is moving onwards, outwards and upwards, to new locations and new subjects dictated by new inspirational forces.

    His exhibition schedule has burgeoned and his larger more intense canvases continue the tradition of experimentation and the construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

    But Cavan and Ireland will stay with him forever. 'They're right up there with Glenn Gould,' Brian Rutenberg says. 'Always will be.'