Large format canvases heavily encrusted with oil paint characterize the work of Brian Christopher Rutenberg. As a child he reveled in the various colors of his grandparents’ azaleas and developed a keen interest in the effects of light in a coastal setting—both of which, he has admitted, have a kinship with his work. He has declared, “I love color.”
Rutenberg was born in Myrtle Beach, along the coast of South Carolina. From 1974 until 1983 he attended Myrtle Beach’s Coastal Academy and started after-school classes in watercolor and experimented with acrylics. He proceeded down the coast to the College of Charleston and studied painting under William Halsey and Michael Tyzack whom he has called his friend and mentor. Graduating with honors in 1987, he went to New York and studied at the School of Visual Arts, earning his Master of Fine Arts degree two years later.
In 1997 Rutenberg received a Fulbright Scholarship which he used to spend seven months in Ireland, and in 2004 the New York Foundation for Arts awarded him a fellowship. In 2018 his alma mater, the College of Charleston, bestowed an honorary degree on him, and at that ceremony he delivered the commencement address.
The artists whom Rutenberg admires most are stylistically disparate; they include the eighteenth-century English painter Thomas Gainsborough for his use of light; Pablo Picasso during his Cubist phase for its emphasis on form, and Hans Hofmann for his paint application and “push-pull theory,” where bold color planes emerge and recede. Furthermore, Rutenberg has demonstrated his keen awareness of art history in a series of twenty-five minute videos available online in which he mentions an eclectic group of artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, Vincent van Gogh, Ad Reinhart, and Edouard Vuillard. The videos also show Rutenberg at work, squeezing viscous globs of paint on a palette, and painting with a broad brush, as well as the palm of his right (gloved) hand.
Rutenberg has shared in commentaries some tidbits of his personal philosophy: “uncertainty makes me feel alive” or “painting can be a means to attain ecstasy.” He has called himself an abstractionist and willingly has admitted that his imagery derives from nature, specifically the outdoors. The paintings often have swatches of cerulean blue which hint at skies, or Kelly green that suggests grass. Tall thin linear shapes are reminiscent of trees. “My paintings present the landscape in the same way I learned to see it, by lying on my belly with my chin in the dirt, foreground so close I can taste it and background far away. No middle ground. Here was the whole of a view, not from above looking down, but from a mollusk’s vantage point, a million miles close.”