Brian Rutenberg's paintings exude luminous flashes of exuberant color that offer a timeless sense of the excitement of the natural world. Their extraordinary visual energy is fresh and vital and helps to convey “the idea that that painting can be a means to attain ecstasy.” Nature forms the inspiration for Brian Rutenberg’s sumptuous abstract orchestrations of color, line, and space. His intention is to create what he calls “sustained meditations on the sheer transformative power of looking” and to express his own brimming sense of wonder in the experience of the beauty of the land. With rich color, densely painted surfaces, and vague references to elements of landscape, his paintings evince an aesthetically powerful conjunction between the intuitive and the seen, the felt and the observed. Rutenberg’s work has been described as “possessing” the landscape, evoking a sense of being in the midst of the woods rather than looking at a picture of one. His works have the quality of participatory feeling rather than detached observation. About this he says, “My paintings present the landscape in the same way I learned to see it, by lying on my belly with my chin in the dirt, foreground so close I can taste it and background far away. No middle ground. Here was the whole of a view, not from above looking down, but from a mollusk’s vantage point, a million miles close.” In creating his art, Rutenberg extracts the structures and colors of landscape and reassembles them into a painterly universe all his own. While his work is populated with references to natural forms—trees, horizon, bodies of water, he has moved further and further away from depicting the literal in order to explore the experience of being in nature. Indeed, for him, the landscape remains a powerful impulse more than a particular subject matter. His high-keyed oil paintings treat the landscape as a jumping off point into abstraction. He relishes the ambiguity of oblique suggestion in place of literal depiction and notes that “an eye not told what to see sees more.” His paintings exude luminous flashes of exuberant color that offer a timeless sense of the excitement of the natural world. Their extraordinary visual energy is fresh and vital and helps to convey “the idea that that painting can be a means to attain ecstasy.” In his work, he aspires for that experience to become more than momentary euphoric emotion and instead hopes that it can be an enduring source for nourishment of the soul and a reminder of the splendor of the natural world. These vibrant and energetically choreographed combinations of color and light exude an idiosyncratic muscularity that bursts forward from the surfaces of his canvases and excites the gaze and refreshes the mind. Indeed, with their exhilarating vibrancy and luminous clarity, these paintings have the remarkable capacity to feel as though the visual equivalence of the very joy of being in nature has been achieved. Rutenberg is a graduate of the College of Charleston, South Carolina. He participated in his first group exhibition in 1985. He moved to New York and received a Master of Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts there. As a young and ambitious painter, he sought to capture a unique evocation of the landscape through abstraction. The base of his interest stems from growing up between Pawley’s Island and Charleston, where river and lake merge with ocean. His early childhood memories continue to be a presence in his painting. In 1997, Rutenberg received a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland. He has also been the recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Studio Grant, the Basil Alkazzi Award, and various other awards and recognitions. He cites as artists whose work has been inspirational Neo-Expressionist Gregory Amenoff, as well as pivotal figures of Abstract Expressionist painting such as Joan Mitchell and Hans Hofmann. His work is included in major public and private collections.