Clear Seeing Place by Brian Rutenberg

Author:Brian Rutenberg [Rutenberg, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brian Rutenberg

Speed

Although a painting is a static object, time plays a fundamental role in the viewer’s experience. Our attention is like money; we only have so much of it to spend. Therefore, a painter must be aware of the viewer’s spending plan. Long, fluid strokes race the eye swiftly from one part of the painting to another, while short, denuded jabs stutter the viewer’s gaze, allowing him or her to wander into other areas. Zigzags appear slow, while curves are fast; Picasso often employed these contrasts side by side, especially in the Blue Period. Walter Sickert and Edgar Degas rendered arms and legs in short dashes that ran counter to the length of the limb, slowing our eyes down to revel in fleshy fullness. If I have a particular color combination in which I want the viewer to dwell, I use broken lines and fragmented colors to halt the eye and draw attention to those areas.

I can get a similar effect by using contrasting hues, like bright purple and permanent green or cherry red and cobalt teal, which arrest the viewer’s gaze and give him or her time to consider more subtle arrangements nearby. Painting doesn’t tell a story, yet it has a beginning, middle, and end. We invest time looking at the surface, dipping in and out of our thoughts, embroidering our vitality onto colored skins, and moving from interior to exterior intuitively. All of this happens in rhythm. Looking at a painting is, at first, like looking out a window on a rainy day: you see either the individual raindrops on the glass or what lies beyond, but not both at the same time. You look at the painted surface or into pictorial illusion. However, a miraculous union rewards the patient viewer. Surface and illusion begin to hum together in a flash of lucidity and expansiveness. Through repeated encounters, the concrete gives way to the transient.

My children ask me when human beings will be able to travel through time; I tell them we already can. We always have. Painting is time travel. A photograph is the same time at the top of the image as at the bottom. However, in painting, it’s a different time with every kiss the brush gives the canvas. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual moments are stacked like deli meat, all working in unison. You are simultaneously peering back in time and being slingshot into the present. Painting can do what nothing else can: it compresses time and accelerates slowness, as if filming a slug inching across your back porch and then playing the film on fast-forward. My paintings are slugs.

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