Guest Post with Brian Rutenberg

Hi Everyone!

I am excited to be here today with you with a guest post from Brian Rutenberg. He has a new book out and I had a chance to find out about the book a little more. Please help me by giving him a warm welcome!
***************************

This is what I do and how I do it                                               

By Brian Rutenberg

I’m not a writer. I’m a painter who wrote a book. That premise was front and center during the two years spent writing CLEAR SEEING PLACE.

For the past five years, I have been self-producing a YouTube video series called Brian Rutenberg Studio Visits to give working artists of all levels a glimpse into my painting life. Each episode features me sitting in a chair looking directly into the camera and expressing whatever is on my mind, as if we were having cold beers and talking shop. Artists have always benefitted from intimate gatherings to exchange ideas, debate, and be around one another during tough times; such gatherings reminded them that they were not alone. The art world has become a highly competitive and commercialized place, but that human need for communion remains; witness the prominence of social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest in the daily lives of artists. Never has it been easier to disseminate images to global audiences in seconds; however, as our awareness expands, there remains a hunger for the wondrous strange of the local. My videos are created in this spirit. The message is simple: This is what I do and how I do it.

The response has been overwhelming. I receive emails every single day from artists around the world sharing their victories and struggles. It became clear that, with fifty five episodes and counting, I had enough original content to compose a book. There is already a full color monograph on my work, published by Radius in 2008, which sold out two printings. However, I didn’t want to follow that template again; painters are terrible collaborators, but we are really good at baking stuff. Because my videos are 100 percent self-made (I write the content, do the lighting, camera work, editing, and promotion), I can say whatever the hell I want. My book had to be the same. I wrote CLEAR SEEING PLACE over the course of two years on my iPad in New York Subways, in Central Park, and in dark corners at Starbucks all over Manhattan. The content is organized in six clear sections, each of which explores a primary part of my painting life: Living, Wandering, Towering, Seeing, Working, and Showing. I kept the margins wide and the font larger than industry standards because I wanted it to be a working book, not a book about work; it is designed to be in studios. With a rough draft, I formed my own publishing house (Permanent Green) and hired the best editor possible. Then I discovered Girl Friday Productions, who took over and shaped the book into a fully realized product: polished, proofread, typeset, and exactly what I envisioned. CLEAR SEEING PLACE was released on October 21, 2016, spent weeks as an Amazon Number One Bestseller in two categories, and continues to get rave reviews.

I’m still not a writer. But I am one grateful painter.

Bio: Widely considered to be one of the finest American painters of his generation, Brian Rutenberg has spent forty years honing a distinctive method of compressing the rich color and form of his native coastal South Carolina into complex landscape paintings that imbue material reality with a deep sense of place. He is a Fulbright Scholar, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, a Basil Alkazzi USA Award recipient, an Irish Museum of Modern Art residency programme participant, and he has had over two hundred exhibitions throughout North America and in Europe. Rutenberg's paintings are in private collections all over the world and are included in such museum collections as the Butler Institute of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of Arts, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Peabody Essex Museum of Art, Greenville County Museum of Art, and many others. His popular YouTube series "Brian Rutenberg Studio Visits" is viewed daily by people all over the world. He lives and works in New York with his wife Kathryn, and their two children. 

Additional Information on Amazon

*****************************

Thanks for stopping by the blog today!