The Wild South: 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 can see the superhuman thing."

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