Susan Rothenberg: Emotions | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #099: Filmed at her home and studio in New Mexico, artist Susan Rothenberg explains how she transforms personal experiences and feelings into works that can become an "emotional moment" for the viewer. While discussing the loss of her dog, Rothenberg describes the process of recovering a memory of her pet through the act of painting.

Susan Rothenberg's early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. The first body of work for which she became known centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic, these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their most essential elements. The horses, along with fragmented body parts (heads, eyes, and hands) are almost totemic, like primitive symbols, and serve as formal elements through which Rothenberg investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting. Rothenbergs paintings since the 1990s reflect her move from New York to New Mexico, her adoption of oil painting, and her new-found interest in using the memory of observed and experienced events (a riding accident, a near-fatal bee sting, walking the dog, a game of poker or dominoes) as an armature for creating a painting. These scenes excerpted from daily life, whether highlighting an untoward event or a moment of remembrance, come to life through Rothenbergs thickly layered and nervous brushwork. A distinctive characteristic of these paintings is a tilted perspective in which the vantage point is located high above the ground. A common experience in the New Mexico landscape, this unexpected perspective invests the work with an eerily objective psychological edge.

Learn more about Susan Rothenberg at: http://www.art21.org/artists/susan-rothenberg

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Dyanna Taylor. Sound: Jim Gallup. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Susan Rothenberg.

I think I care about beauty, but I don't go for it.

I hope it sometimes might be in there.

I think maybe more in terms of a beautiful moment than trying to figure out what beauty is.

I hope that my paintings can be emotional moments for people.

I just know that it takes a certain emotion to lock in for me to commit to a painting.

And a certain timidity at first, and then the second painting, and then I might go back to the first painting,

And force more bravery on it.

Oh, this is okay. You can handle this.

I have given myself full range of the painting.

I don't limit myself in anyway. I know I'm not a landscape painter. I know that. I know that's sombody else's job.

And I don't think I'm a still life painter.

But I would like to think that I can paint portraits, which I have not successfully done.

I like to think that the whole thing is wide open and then I don't have to abide by any rules, anymore.

But I was happy too, when I was young, because it looked like a very radical world.

And I really wanted to be part of it.

We had to put that dog down, because she was in kidney failure.

And I was holding her before the doctor did that, and I wanted to make a painting about it.

How it felt, to remember her by.

And I've had the arm everywhere you see this darker tone. I've had the arm there. [chuckles]

I had it like this, like this, then I could not figure out how my feet should be,

Then, I could not figure out where the arm might be coming of the body.

And finally, I decided to stop worrying about it. All I wanted was that dog held there,

And my sneakers grounding the bottom of the painting.

I just felt so sad, and so... I felt the loss of this dog quite a lot. So I just try to recover her for a moment in the painting.

It's completely personal.

And I could see that the hand's not painted well... That one is, that one isn't.

Woman: Which one?

ROTHENBERG: The left hand is just fine. It's doing what it needs to do.

This one is blobby. [laughs]

It needs some wristbones, and some fingernails, and some definition.

In the paintings, it's there, the tenderness. I work for it.

I'm not afraid of it. If I could put my bleeding f**king heart in there, I would. [chuckles]

But as it is, it's her and my arms and my shoes.

You know, in the most all-embracing kind of send-off I could give her.