I’m having a party in my studio!

I’m having a party in my studio, so I decided to repaint some of the abstracts that I’ve done that weren’t getting many comments from people and I had decided were not working. I reworked the first one, and it went pretty well. I reworked a bigger one, and it went even better, and then I attempted to work rework a third one, and I got nowhere. I painted the whole thing out about three times and still didn’t like it.

While talking to an artist friend in the next studio, we hit upon Wolf Kahn, a German-born American painter. Kahn is known for his fusion of color, spontaneity, and loose brush strokes, which create the luminous and vibrant atmospheric rural New England landscapes and color fields. This, of course, reminded me of Brian Rutenberg. Brian's paintings exude luminous flashes of exuberant color that offer a timeless sense of the excitement of the Carolina Low Country. I love Brian‘s work always. I love his sense of color. I love his compositions: the crazy complicated line work, the beautiful, eye-popping colors, and gentle areas of smoky colors that just soothe my soul. 

I remembered that Brian had done quite a few videos on YouTube. So I decided after watching the first one that came up, which was like number 86, to go back to the first one and go through them all while painting a landscape. Brian says he's a landscape painter. I feel he paints the essence of the landscape, and he paints them beautifully. I don’t want to copy Brian‘s brilliant work. I want him to teach me layering colors, eye-popping colors, and how to load a brush. I have learned a ton listening to his voice and learning through these videos. I want to take what I’ve learned and apply it to my abstract and my figurative work, and I can’t wait. 

I don’t know if I’ll do any landscapes. Probably not. But if you want to see this one, my studio will be open this Friday from 5 to 9 PM and I’m having a party called Artini. In my building of 200 artist, I am artist of the month this month, and my work will be displayed as you walk in the building and in the eighth floor gallery, but the party will be in my studio on the seventh floor.

There are those that say I need to have one style. My style keeps changing. I’m rather proud of that because it means I’m learning. To be an artist is to learn. And I’m still finding my voice, trying to find what keeps me awake at night, trying to find the inner soul of my work.

In one of his short videos, he talks about how he loves disruptions in life. He said it drove his family crazy while driving. So of course, driving home for lunch after hearing that video, there was a very large dumpster being delivered to a building, and the truck had to block my lane of traffic to deliver it. Instead of being as irritated as I normally would be, I sat there and watched. This truck had the ability to ratchet up this very large dumpster, which was probably 20 feet long, up into the air and let it slide down on rails. I kept watching all the different shapes and the line work that was created by delivering this piece of equipment. Once it was finally on the ground, he then took the truck and backed into it and pushed it back into the space where it belongs, and I wondered how many times he had to do that to learn how to do that perfectly. I also thought of him driving that truck compared to my day of pushing paint on a canvas.

 What an amazing world we live in.

Brian is also the cliffnote of art for me. He’s an art history buff. Although I know more than a non-artist about art history, I know a fraction of what he knows. He innerweaves little gems about artists and paintings into these videos, and I get to take the shortcut to seeing what he sees about artists across time.

Because I’m doing them in order on YouTube, I feel like he’s teaching a class that I am in and I’m the only pupil. It feels personal. I feel like I'm meant to learn what he has to teach. YouTube has a funny way of not putting his videos in order, which I somehow think Brian would think is funny. Brian has a great sense of humor, and the fact that I have to stop what I’m doing and find the next video so I can watch them in order, I think would make Brian laugh.

I’ve been getting great insight into his whole life. His childhood was spent in the low country of the Carolinas and his adult life in New York City. He paints a picture of both with his words.

He also paints very large, and I love that. Some are 7 feet wide, some 12 feet wide. He thinks of horizontal paintings as being landscapes and vertical paintings as being figurative. I’ve never heard that before. So most of his paintings are horizontal since he paints landscapes.

I've included a link to his website. You can also find him on YouTube. I'm on number 49 of 80-some. I can't wait to watch the rest.