Product Description

Rackstraw Downes paints down-to-earth, often gritty features of today's American environment in an unflinching and highly realistic style. This book is the first to provide a multifaceted picture of his work, its intellectual foundations, and its place in the history of art--from both outside commentators and Downes himself.

Beautifully illustrated, with copious examples from thirty years of the artist's work, the book makes eminently clear why Downes is widely regarded as a "painter's painter." It showcases many of the artist's panoramic pictures--painted with a strong sense of place and a miniaturist's sense of scale. The images, which depict industrial parks, construction sites, housing projects, refineries, razor wire, and landfills, stimulate fresh thoughts about these supposedly unattractive sights. Bathed in the light of a precise time, the paintings resonate with a strikingly evocative quality.

The three essays that accompany Downes's art provide rare insights into the way a painter thinks and works. Sanford Schwartz explores the relationships between the artist's personal and intellectual background and his oeuvre. Robert Storr situates Downes in the context of a number of highly prominent contemporary artists such as Chuck Close, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Smithson in a way that offers a new interpretation of Downes's work, while making clear its importance within twentieth-century art. Downes's own essay, "Turning the Head in Empirical Space," presents a direct, firsthand account of his working methods within a larger discussion on spatial paradigms of Renaissance and post-Renaissance modes of painting.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #377757 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
It might seem odd that a brilliant realist painter would choose to spend months working on a seven-foot-long canvas of a boring stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. But in Rackstraw Downes' hands, ordinary or unappealing elements of the American landscape suddenly seem worthy of close attention. Rackstraw Downes, an overdue tribute to the English-born artist, combines 100 striking color reproductions of the artist's panoramic paintings (including vivid details) with illuminating commentary. After studying at Yale University in the early 1960s, when abstraction was beginning to yield to Pop and Minimalism, Downes found his footing by taking a long, careful look at landscape. In recent years, he has painted sites in Manhattan, including luminous city views and an eerie 1998 portrait of untenanted office space in the World Trade Center. But his major subjects have always been marginal spaces in nature—landfills and scrubland, culverts and dumps. Putting up with the vagaries of weather and interruptions by suspicious officials, he paints these scenes onsite. Lively details picked out in jewel-like colors are united by the precise evocation of light and atmosphere, the geometry of lines and curves, and Downes’ complex system of perspective. (He writes about recreating the experience of turning your head to take in an entire panorama.) Seeking neither to romanticize these scenes nor to critique them—although he is an environmentalist at heart—Downs prefers the naturalist's dispassionate approach. An essay by Sanford Schwartz engagingly discusses the artist's background and interests. Robert Storr, the former Museum of Modern Art curator, analyzes Downes' relationship to key issues of realist painting in the twentieth century. Downes, a longtime essayist, contributes detailed observations about his use of perspective, which lead him on conversational excursions into the history of art. A detailed chronology and bibliography round out this superb study of an "artist's artist" who deserves a much wider audience. --Cathy Curtis

From Publishers Weekly
"Just the facts," a phrase much invoked in discussions of Downes' work, is elevated to an aesthetic practice by these three essays and more than 100 plates. Typically producing realistic landscapes painted on decidedly horizontal canvases (some, only as tall as a standard sheet of paper, stretch several feet wide), Downes focuses on freeway overpasses, cement factories, ventilation towers and traffic intersections, but neither these constructions nor the ecological and market critiques they imply are Downes' "subjects." Downes is a "hard-core 'eyeball' realist" Storr tells us in a thoughtfully elegant essay. Storr's efficient moniker cuts to the quick of Downes' practice: Downes paints by looking deeply; he shuns the assistance of photography and, instead, returns to a site several times during as long as a two- to three-year period to render each scene as faithfully as possible. The goal is not to recreate what can be explicitly seen, but to reveal what can be apprehended only through attention sustained across a vast span of time. In an essay contributed by the artist, Downes describes his process as "pitting all-out empiricism against habit, memory, formulae, precedent." As this book shows, Downes makes "the facts," subjective though they may be, beautiful things to see.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Downes likes to paint long, low landscapes, giving you a panorama of industrial waste or highway interchanges". -- The Star-Ledger

Rackstraw Downes, the veteran painter of landscapes and urban places, is a realist esteemed by people, including me, who normally have scant use for realism in art. [His work] is powerful in quiet, stubborn ways... luminous, yet taciturn: just the facts... There is an existentialist, not to say quixotic, flavor to Downes's insistence on realizing the real by hand. He likes jam-ups of culture and nature, where practical human uses overlap with indifferent geology and shaggy flora--he is the bard of weeds. -- Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Downes - True Painter of the Modern age
This book contains art by Rackstraw Downes which is more likely to be taken for photographs than the paintings that they are. Now, these are not still life or portraits of people but very common urban landscapes and waste lands. The book also has a section by the painter himself on some of the difficulties faced by artists when the vertical angle seems to change over a wider or deeper view.

Is Modern art representative of our age? What tools of our age can be used to truly stand for its time? Jackson Pollock,master of 'drip' technique feels,"The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any past culture". Downes with his technique of painting what he sees, has expressed modern age with the tall buildings,metal bridges,expressways and cars in a very realistic way like a camera would.It would be unfair to compare a painter with a camera.The book has well organized material on the differences in art by a realist and what a photo can hold.
The book also has references to the work of many other artists like Jonathan Borofsky(Molecule Man), Eva Hesse, Brice Marden and so on..

All things seen and considered
Rackstraw Downes is a unique artist. He must have been born with the patience of Job or simply endless concentration patterns, as every thing the man draws, etches, or paints represents the most painstakingly observed detail and transfer to paper or canvas.

Though his name is well known to museums and art collectors, the general public is less aware of his prodigious gifts. This superb book should change that. Sanford Schwartz is a gifted writer and his essay on the work and the man is not only eminently readable, it also informs about the clarity of Downes' execution of his landscapes and vistas of cities. Robert Storr contributes another essay that places Rackstraw Downes in the pantheon with other representational artists and surrounds his evaluation with fine art history writing.

But of course the glory of this large-scale volume is in the reproduction plates of the paintings and drawings. Generous space is given to define details so important to understanding Downes' gift. And the extended panorama paintings are given fluid space to unfold so that the reader can slowly absorb the incredible amount of visual information Downes gives us.

This is one of the collectable artist monographs - in content, in visuals, and in design. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, December 05

Painter's painter
these paintings are so well crafted. i am an abstract painter, and these paintings amaze me in their quality of brushwork, composition, etc. no matter what sort of painter one is (realist/abstract, etc), they can stand to learn something from this talented landscape/urbanscape painter.