Clear Seeing Place: Studio Visits

by Brian Rutenberg

Overview

From the salt marshes and moss-draped live oaks of the South Carolina Lowcountry to the New York art world, Clear Seeing Place takes the reader behind the studio door to explore the making of a painter in intimate detail. Brimming with the joy of process and a love of art history, Brian Rutenberg reveals the places, people, and experiences that led to the paint­ings for which he is well known today. This book is packed with ideas, observations, techniques, and career advice all thought­fully arranged into six sections designed to inspire artists of all levels, as well as anyone interested in creativity.

Clear Seeing Place is a companion to the artist's popular YouTube series, "Brian Rutenberg Studio Visits," and is a love letter to painting written by a painter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997442304
Publisher:	Permanent Green LLC
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Widely considered to be one of the finest American painters of his generation, Brian Rutenberg has spent forty years honing a distinctive method of compressing the rich color and form of his native coastal South Carolina into complex landscape paintings that imbue material reality with a deep sense of place. He is a Fulbright Scholar, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and a Basil Alkazzi USA Award recipient, and he has had over two hundred exhibitions throughout North America. Rutenberg's paintings are in private collections all over the world and are included in such public collections as the Butler Institute of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Peabody Essex Museum of Art, Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina State Museum, and many others. He lives and works in New York City with his wife, Kathryn, and their two children. For more about Brian Rutenberg, please visit www.brianrutenbergbooks.com and www.brianrutenbergart.com.

Editorial Reviews

04/30/2018
Abstract painter Rutenberg reveals his passion, authenticity, and artistic vision in a series of thoughtful vignettes about his life and work. Expanding on his YouTube series Studio Visits, the author invites readers into his New York City studio to learn about the messy act of creation, sharing his journey of self-discovery through short essays on his creative process and the people who have influenced his work, including the painter Gregory Amendoff and art dealer John Raimondi, who supported Rutenberg early in his career. Rutenberg tracks his artistic growth from his childhood in South Carolina in the 1970s experimenting with mud and stencils, to his days as an art student living in Queens, N.Y., and later in his career as an internationally exhibited landscape painter living in Manhattan. He frequently refers to musicians who influenced him; for example, he practices Duke Ellington’s dictum­, “The wise musicians are those who play what they can master,” by painting in his studio every day. This dedicated training has freed his imagination and originality, he writes, creating what he calls a “clear seeing place” into his art and revealing “a deeper truth that relies less on visual accuracy than on personal and cultural experience.” This well-written artist’s coming-of-age-story will appeal to young artists looking to make a career of their passion. (BookLife)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2017-05-15
In this debut chronicle, an abstract painter offers a vivid look into a working studio and the development of his own artistic vision. To many nonartists, abstract art may seem to be the most inaccessible of all forms, as it often lacks familiar images to cling to. To Rutenberg, however, abstraction represents a way of bringing the world up-close, so that one not only sees, but feels its integral parts. "Art happens," Rutenberg states, "when the intellectual and the visceral collide so violently that they fuse into a third thing." His love of art is palpable in this book, which serves as a companion piece to his YouTube series, "Brian Rutenberg Studio Visits." He only sparsely describes the events of his own life, but he lavishly and lovingly dissects his growth as an artist, from his childhood compositions, created out of marsh mud and colored paper on hot summer days on the South Carolina coast, to later canvases that he stabbed with an ice pick in his loft studio in Manhattan. Alongside this deeply personal story, Rutenberg also offers a down-to-earth course on the transcendent power of art, presenting a wide range of examples, including works by Pablo Picasso and pianist Glenn Gould. The text is peppered with memorable passages, such as "All artists live in the gap between what they imagine and produce," "When the effortless appears difficult, it's entertainment. When the difficult appears effortless, it's art," and "An artist's job is to monkey with stuff. We don't seek solutions but problems. We play because we can." Rutenberg's love of his work is infectious, and his analyses of artistic issues are engaging and appealing, never indulging in the elitism that some may associate with the world of fine art. His delight in his chosen craft also counters the myth of the tortured artist, although a slightly less rosy perspective and a few more details about life's challenges might have added a welcome touch of realism. All in all, however, it's an exhilarating treatise on how to really "see" the world. An original and stimulating memoir that takes readers into the mind and heart of an artist.

Kirkus Reviews