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The Sky Above, The Earth Beneath Natural elements figure into Arizona landscapist DAVID ROTHERMEL'S paintings and his life BY VIRGINIA CAMPBELL
GIVEN THE POWER of the southwestern landscape to offer visions of constantly changing, yet ancient and eternal, beauty, how could it ever not have become the region in the United States most noted for inspiring in painters a sweeping experience of personal and artistic renaissance? David Rothermel, a landscapist who has lived in New Mexico and Arizona for over 20 years, is one of many southwestern artists whose crucial sense of place was achieved only after struggles that involved their leaving other locations in which they were not ultimately meant to work. But Rothermel's specific experience of renewal was unusually distinct - long in coming and a double affirmation upon arrival. In 1987 he painted his first southwestern landscape. "With that painting," he says, "I knew I'd arrived at my own voice, and it happened so easily, it came out like butter." It proceeded to be chosen for the poster celebrating New Mexico's 75th anniversary of statehood.
SILENT CRESCENDO, a 7-by-5 foot oil that is more properly a skyscape than a landscape, depicts a vaulting sunset as seen through a bank of stratocumulus clouds that keep melodrama at bay and allow all the shifting tones of realistic end-of-day light to play out. The earth below this celestial event is painted in deep, marine blues to look like either fluid land or hardened sea. Nature is at its most ethereally gorgeous and shamelessly profound at sunset, and it is either a very foolish or very daring painter who attempts to capture it. Rothermel is the latter, though he might argue that he is both - he credits one of his early teachers with giving the best advice of his career: "Dare to be lousy." The painting SILENT CRESCENDO succeeds because though it may appear, at first glance, to be trying to compete with, or steal from, the ultimate creator, it reveals itself over time to be about other things entirely - things like the difficulty of truly seeing what we are looking at, the sense that we are always on the side of where the truth is, the unnerving feeling that everything lovely exists right at the edge of total darkness.
ROTHERMEL CAME TO PAINT SILENT CRESCENDO after painting nothing but commercial billboards for six years in what amounted to, in retrospect, an extended recovery from his art education. Having grown up in the Susquehanna River Valley in central Pennsylvania, one of two sons of a salesman and a schoolteacher who looked upon painting as a very unpromising career path, Rothermel embraced the experience of art school. He studied first at York Academy of Art in Pennsylvania, where he learned art history and the basics of commercial art, then at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts - the country's oldest fine arts institution, home at one time to artists like Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins - where he absorbed an essential and invaluable body of information and technique as well as the intellectual dilemmas of the late 1960s/early -70s art world. "The Pennsylvania Academy is artist taught by artists," says Rothermel. "You learn how to be a professional fine artist - how to deal with slides and associations and galleries, but also how to respect yourself as an artist." But Rothermel, like every other young artist of the time drawn innately to representational painting, struggled for identity amid the dominating influences of abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art.
At the Pennsylvania Academy, Rothermel learned of the distinguished 19th century artist in his own family tree. One of his teachers told him, "We have lots of Rothermels in the basement," and that was because Peter Frederick Rothermel, a respected and very successful painter in his time (he was paid an astounding $125,000 for his monumental BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG which hangs in the Harrisburg Museum of Art today), had been a director at the Pennsylvania Academy. Finding an ancestor's realistic paintings in the basement of one's art school might well be enough to propel a young painter into the avant-garde, but Rothermel had also come in contact with a master abstractionist who became his mentor, Brice Marden.
At the Skowhegen School in Maine, Marden - whom art historian and critic Robert Hughes deems "perhaps the finest American abstract painter of his generation" - taught Rothermel one summer and had a permanent, dramatic impact on his development. "He knew all of art history," say Rothermel of Marden, "including not just the masters, but the minor players. He was articulate, and he knew color theory from studying with Josef Albers." From that summer, one particular day stands out in Rothermel's memory - the one when Marden took him to Monhegan Island, a location that has inspired dozens of American artists, from Edward Hopper to Jamie Wyeth. "He'd taught me about edges," says Rothermel, the way hard edges come forward and soft edges recede. On Monhegan we looked at the horizon and he told me to look carefully at that edge, where the water and the sky met. It wasn't hard and it wasn't soft. It was just two volumes meeting, and there was no line there."
Rothermel graduated from Pennsylvania Academy in 1973 with a stash of prizes and awards to his name and having participated in an impressive roster of exhibitions. But before long, in the thrall of conceptualism, he was creating such works as REMAINS TO BE SEEN, which involved cutting down and trimming the branches from several 30- to 40- foot trees, arranging the trunks in alphabetical letters and erecting the letters in an open field to read, "remains to be seen." Obviously the young artist had a dangerously clever mind for conceptualism ( a passerby who asked the artist what the work meant was told, "Remains to be seen"), but when the owner of the field chopped up the work of conceptual art for firewood, it was surely a sign that Rothermel had some traveling ahead of him on the way to his true home.
In 1981, "BURNED OUT" on all the "isms" of the 20th century painting and on being an artist in general, he went to New Mexico, where he took a job as a billboard painter without ever telling anyone he'd been a painter of another sort altogether. For six long years he worked on 10-by-40 foot posters 20 to 30 feet off the ground, comfortable at least with the size and height of the medium after his years of monumental abstraction. He got married and lived life without his own arty until one day a gust of wind caught him and he fell 30 feet from a billboard he was working on, breaking both wrists and assorted bones. During the ensuing medical leave of absence he started painting again with new purpose. "I'd been confused by the isms," he says, "and it took me a long time to get them out of my art." But they were gone indeed when he embarked on SILENT CRESCENDO and the paintings that followed.
Actually, considering Rothermel's eventual response to the Southwest, he must have all along been suffering from claustrophobia as much as over-intellectualism. It wasn't just urban skyscrapers, but the wooded hills of Pennsylvania that uncomfortably enclosed him. "I've never liked small spaces," he admits, and many of his canvases celebrate the animate radiance of light unimpeded by even the less-imposing foliage of New Mexico and Arizona. He always preferred southern New Mexico to the more wooded Santa Fe area, and now he lives in Scottsdale, AZ, he is surrounded by a landscape where "less color is absorbed by the vegetation so that light bounces, and the horizons are softer." His studio, located in a warehouse in Scottsdale Air Park, has skylights that let in the brilliant Arizona radiance that inspires him.
Rothermel's oil paintings are inevitably large (anywhere from 4 to 9 feet wide) because "the size gives you that feeling of being in the landscape - it's closer to the reality of being in open space." They are also large because this was the chosen scale of the era of lyrical abstraction from which the artist has salvages a great deal. Created through a series of transparent layers that gradually gain opacity, weight, and definition, Rothermel's landscapes retain all of Brice Marden's lessons in volume and color and other abstract concerns. In fact, in choosing to paint southwestern land/skyscapes, Rothermel has immersed himself in about as abstract a concrete subject matter as can be imagined.
In addition to his oil canvases, Rothermel, now 53, has all along painted watercolors of the same subject matter. "Watercolor has a tendency to do what it wants to do," says Rothermel. "When I paint watercolors, I think, God, just give me 50 percent." Interestingly, these watercolors have been, until recently, as intimate in scale (usually less than 12 inches in either dimension) as the oils are grand. I have always wanted a marriage between my oils and my watercolors," says the artist, but his first experiment in larger scale a few years back, working on 22-by-35 inch paper, was a disappointment. Perhaps recalling his teacher's dictum : "Dare to be lousy," he opted against returning to the smaller format and instead invested in "elephant sheets" (40-by-60 inch paper), and went on to paint pieces he can stand by.
In a career marked by such inspired stabs in the dark, not to mention fast rises, sudden falls, lengthy hibernation, and impressive recovery, Rothermel prefers to downplay serious discussion of his motivations as an artist. "I paint to give myself something to do while I daydream," he says, laughing at his own joke. The thing is, one suspects this is a perfectly accurate statement, and that Rothermel has found the perfect place to do it.
Virginia Campbell, the former editor in chief of Movieline, also writes for Departures and Traditional Home.
Rothermel is represented by Duley Jones Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Houshang's Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Wood River Gallery, Sun Valley, ID; Watergate Gallery, Washington, DC; Museum Works, Aspen, CO; and Glenn Cutter Gallery, Las Cruces, NM.
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