‘I Try to Recover Her for a Moment in the Painting’: Watch the Late Artist Susan Rothenberg Memorialize Her Beloved Dog on Canvas

“I think I care about beauty, but I don’t go for it,” the artist
Susan Rothenberg says wryly in an episode of
Art21’s “Extended Play” series filmed back in
2010. “I hope it sometimes might be in there.”

The artist, who died this week at the age of 75, may not have
consciously injected beauty in the most traditional sense, but
perhaps that’s what made her sketchy figuration so expressive and
appealing.

The New York-born artist charmed the art world with her
paintings of horses, an unusual subject at a moment when minimalism
and abstraction reigned supreme. Later in her career she moved away
from the horse image, but animals still remained a central part of
her everyday life. Rothenberg moved to New Mexico in 1990 to live
with her new husband, the artist Bruce Nauman. There, the desert
with its plants and animals continued to inspire her work.

In the video, Rothenberg describes the emotional experience of
painting a kind of self portrait soon after losing her beloved dog.
In the work, Rothenberg’s arms are wrapped around the pet, who is
at the center of the work; it depicts the last time she held her
dog before the vet put him down.

“In the paintings where it’s
there—the tenderness—I work for it,” Rothenberg recalls,
remembering the pain of that loss. “I’m not afraid of it. If I
could put my bleeding fucking heart in there, I would.”
In the painting, the dog is
rendered small and childlike, while the artist’s arms are long and
gangly, as if trying to envelop the animal and keep it
safe. 

“I just know that it takes a
certain emotional lock-in for me to commit to a painting,” she said in the video. “I hope my
paintings can be emotional moments for people.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part
of Art21’s PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century,
below. 

This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration
between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking
artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art
in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch episodes
of other series like “New York Close Up” and “Extended Play” and
learn about the organization’s educational programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘I Try to Recover Her for a Moment in the
Painting’: Watch the Late Artist Susan Rothenberg Memorialize Her
Beloved Dog on Canvas appeared first on artnet News.