Susan Rothenberg, a very fine painter, died last week at the age of 75. I knew of her but didn't know the breadth of her work particularly well; this video touched me. Some of the animal images remind me of Lascaux and other cave paintings, and many of them have a quality -- like those prehistoric drawings -- that speaks to me in the present moment.
She said in a 2005 interview, “If you don’t know what you’re doing out here in the South West, in this kind of isolation, if you don’t understand that you’re supposed to have work and a purpose to every day, you’re going to float off into the stratosphere or move very quickly back to an urban center.”
Gemini.
What I like especially about her work is that all of it feels closely informed by drawing. She must have drawn all the time. She made prints, she painted. But all of these disciplines informed the others, and you can see it in the finished works. There's a lot to learn from here.
The American art critic and curator Robert Storr said this about Rothenberg's drawings:
"...fundamentally, drawing is as much a matter of evocation as it is of depiction, of identifying the primary qualities of things in the world and transposing them without a loss of quiddity. This at any rate is what drawing has been for Rothenberg."
Untitled, pencil on paper, 1983
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