Voices George Rush === George Rush: [00:00:00] *Over** the past few years, I've been invited to make things in specific spaces, and I'm very interested in how those spaces end up affecting the work that I make for the space and integrating the space in some way, conceptually or physically into the work itself. * Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: Joining me today is George Rush, a Professor in the Painting and Drawing program of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. In addition to participating in [00:01:00] numerous group exhibitions since 2001, he has had solo exhibitions in New York, Copenhagen, Madrid, Miami, Santa Fe, and Michigan. He's received awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Professor Rush, welcome to Voices. George Rush: Thanks. Thank you for having me. David Staley: Well, I'd like to talk about some recent work starting with _Curtain Walls_, which you've just displayed in Mexico, I believe. George Rush: Yes. Thank you for asking about it. _Curtain Walls_ is a exhibition I made in Mexico City, and it came at the invitation of a sort of artist run, DIY type space called KOIK Contemporary, KOIK, and what their mission is is to invite an artist to come for a month or so, engage in, you know, provided with an apartment that's big enough to work in, engage in the city itself, and then make an exhibition in their gallery space. I've always wanted to go to Mexico City, fascinated by the mural [00:02:00] tradition there, fascinated by cities in general, and I grew up in New York and love cities. But, I only ended up going for two weeks; I brought my wife and my son and our family situation was such that I couldn't spend an entire month there. And so, I made a show in two weeks, which was a new experience for me, and I'd like to back up and say that I sort of think about the studio process and working to make exhibitions in two different ways. In my career, I've made shows that are made up of works that I made independently in the studio without a kind of venue in mind. Mm-hmm. But, *over the past few years, I've been invited to make things in specific spaces, and I'm very interested in how those spaces end up affecting the work that I make for the space and integrating the space in some way, conceptually or physically into the work itself. *And so, the [00:03:00] first thing that I did when I got to Mexico was I went to the gallery, which is, you can see some of these pictures, I know this is an oral medium, not a... David Staley: I can see them. George Rush: Yeah. David Staley: But the audience maybe can't. George Rush: But it's not one big white room, it's sort of broken up and it has sort of funky lighting and one side of it are garage doors that open onto the street. And so, what I wanted to do was create works that would engage the space in a way that both unified it, but also drew attention to its differences. So, this painting here, is that, is that a painting? Is that a collage? I, I can't quite David Staley: tell from what I'm looking at here. George Rush: So, one of the conditions of this show became time and being a, you know, having to come up with an idea, collect the materials and produce work within a month, but two weeks in Mexico City and then two weeks back in Columbus before the show opened. And I have for a long time, my work has been very involved with photography and [00:04:00] with collage, but I hadn't produced works for exhibition that were straight up photographs, were straight up collage before, and so, I saw this as a kind of opportunity to explore that. And then talking to the director of the gallery, I was made aware of this kind of amazing print opportunity there, where there are neighborhoods of industry in Mexico City that have kind of gone away in the United States, but for example a neighborhood that we went to that was one sort of garage sized production space for printing after the other, and we found a place that would print on the fabric. And so , what you're looking at here is a photo collage that I made in Photoshop, made of photographs that I took throughout Mexico City and then had printed onto fabric. And then that's just tacked onto the wall, so it's not stretched, it has a kind of movement to it against the wall, the fabric is quite thin. So it'll David Staley: sort of like move in a, [00:05:00] in a breeze or...? George Rush: Yeah. If you were to walk by it, it has a little bit of you know, it's not fixed, if you will. Mm-hmm. Which, for me, was quite important with these pieces because of the speed with which I was making the work. The subject matter itself is really the streets of Mexico City and how does one that's not from there even begin to engage in it. And I wanted the show to really reflect my condition as being somebody that's not from there, visiting for a short amount of time, not quite as a tourist, but certainly not as anybody with any expertise, and what are the types of things that one notices? And so, this piece that you're looking at is a series of photographs of different walls. Walls are hugely important in my work, but also in Mexico City, there's, as opposed to, let's say a city like Paris or even New York, there's no uniformity in Mexico City, everything seems to be sort of [00:06:00] aggregated. And so I was really, really interested in how in one block you would see very a huge variety of, of, wall coverings, decorations, window treatments, et cetera. And then, sort of integrated into that are some smaller images. There's Trotsky's cane from the Trotsky House Museum, my mother died a month before I made this piece, so there's a little photograph of her head and of me holding her hand. There's some other sort of little narrative pieces in there as well. And as you can see, the pieces were sort of big, like this is about six feet. There was another kind of work that was in the show that was closer to straight up photographs, also printed onto fabric, about 30 by 40 inches. These were photographs that I took, again, walking around Mexico City and then in Photoshop, I processed them so that they are made up of a very, very, sort of [00:07:00] broad half tone, color half tone. And so, if you get close to them they are quite difficult to get into focus and you have to sort of step back. Mm-hmm. To, to have them be in focus. David Staley: Like pointillistic, almost. George Rush: Yeah. Yeah, totally, absolutely. And I was really interested in how Mexico City, and again, this is coming from, admittedly, the point of view of somebody that's totally naive about Mexico City and what it would be like to live there, and it's a incredibly complicated place, there are 22 million people, et cetera. But, what I saw is these, all these points of sort of micro resistance. So, this is a photograph of a board that had all of these advertisements for software, AutoCAD, Windows, Adobe software, but it was all counterfeit, David Staley: right? Oh. George Rush: But it was being sold on the street. And there's another image of, let's say like a record store that's just in a small kiosk on the street or there's an image of sneakers being sold, [00:08:00] Nikes, in a marketplace, and again, whether they're authentic or not to me isn't so much the issue, it's that this isn't Footlocker, it's not Walgreens, it's not Walmart. You know, these are, in a sense, I felt as if I was seeing the, you know, capitalism of my childhood where, you know, not everything was put into a big box store, and I found that actually quite hopeful. David Staley: Hmm. George Rush: The third piece and the third type of work in the exhibition was a curtain that I made, and I wanted to divide the space in some way. David Staley: Is that a solid wall that I'm seeing right there, and is the curtain passing...? George Rush: Yeah, so this is a column. Yeah. And then behind the column is this curtain, and the curtain is about seven by seven feet and it is made by printing a photograph of a curtain seen through a plate glass window onto flat cloth. So, the illusionism that you're seeing is just that, this is flat, [00:09:00] and it's also double sided. So, on the other side, there's also this kind of this curtain image. David Staley: A very, very, very, very small Christo, sorry. George Rush: Well, it's more like a, a like a kind of Photoshop Magritte, in that it's, t his is not a curtain. Right. But there, it created this kind of interesting experience where you're looking at something that's, you're also seeing the reflection of a glass that was in front of the curtain in the photograph that this originated from, and so, it's a bit confusing when you're there, even though you know what you're looking at. David Staley: Where do the ideas come from? So, let's just take this show. I mean, yes, you had certain constraints. George Rush: Mm-hmm. David Staley: But, you know, the idea, for instance, to to do this curtain or to, or to depict the counterfeit goods: from where do ideas spring for you? George Rush: That's a really good question, and I wonder increasingly if I have ideas or if I just happen upon things. And as I've gotten older, I've [00:10:00] increasingly worked by photographs that I take of the world around me. Things reflect a kind of interiority or sort of subjectivity, but they're not from me, if you will. And I, in a sort of half joking way, feel like I less and less have an imagination. You know, I, I, I'm not a world builder in the way that many people are. And so, to a certain degree it's a kind of, I don't know, ethnography, documentarian kind of approach to things. But I'm an artist, i'm not a professional, and so I don't get too caught up in, in the sort of methodologies that are appropriate for that. I use my cell phone. I don't use any fancy equipment. You David Staley: mean you take photographs, you use your cell phone? George Rush: Yeah. And that's really important to me that it's this very, very basic thing that we all have. And that kind of technique approach comes really out of a kind of 20th century de-skilling idea about making. But of course, I've accumulated [00:11:00] a lot of interests in my life and, you know, so something like the curtain: I've made many, many, many paintings of curtains. Really? By hand. Oil paintings, acrylic paintings, gouache paintings. The curtain is this kind of wonderful metaphor for painting. It's also kind of in the history of painting, you know, it's like a demonstration of skill. David Staley: Like draperies on... George Rush: Yeah. David Staley: Clothing and that sort of thing. George Rush: Yeah, exactly. And it's also, you know, it has a, has a kind of symbolic quality to it. You know, what's being hidden, what's being revealed. We're looking at something, but we're looking at nothing in a way. David Staley: You said that curtains feature a lot in your work. Earlier you said that walls were important. Why walls? George Rush: I think walls also have a really interesting relationship to painting, and paintings often hang on walls or are built into walls or are painted onto walls. They're flat, they have often a kind of texture, and I've long been in, you know, I've always been interested in architecture. My parents were [00:12:00] architects and I grew up around a lot of books and pieces of design and, but I'm not so much interested in architecture per se, as architectural history or the images of architecture or how architecture plays a role in the way that we live and helps us organize the way that we live or frustrates the ways that we live. And so, things like walls, windows, doors, curtains, I think feature in, in my interest. David Staley: You've anticipated my next question, because architecture seems to appear in a lot of your work. Let's talk about _Dresden Cabinet_, which is... Sure. Most certainly about architecture. George Rush: Yeah. This was my last project, and I made an exhibition at a gallery in Dresden a year and a half ago. David Staley: In Dresden, Germany. Yes, George Rush: in Dresden, Germany, yeah. And that came out of a wonderful residency that the Greater Columbus Arts Council funds, and I was able... David Staley: They're the sister city, I think, George Rush: dresden. Yes, exactly. So, I was able to spend two months in Dresden in a residency at the end of 2021. Got to know the [00:13:00] city, took a lot of photographs, made a bunch of paintings off of those photographs and then had a, a show in a gallery there last year. Out of that, I was invited to make a project in this space this last, it just opened a couple weeks ago. And this, what we're looking at here in this image is a GDR era guardhouse that is in a public park that used to be part of the summer palace for the Dresden Royalty. David Staley: So this is like East Germany? Yeah. Former East Germany. George Rush: Former east Germany. And it's been historically, claimed so they, they can't tear it down, and you can't do anything to it, you can't build anything into it, you can't sink a nail in the walls. But the architecture program at the academy, one of their professors, Henning Haupt, has created a curatorial program where they're inviting artists to do small interventions. And I was really interested in this building. And so, David Staley: if I may and, and I hope this isn't glib. Please. [00:14:00] This, it's a very small building. It reminds me almost of a, of like a restroom at a rest stop. George Rush: Absolutely. David Staley: I, like I said, I hope that's not too impertinent. George Rush: No, it's, I mean, it really is tiny. Two sides of it have windows, two sides of it are closed. There's a sort of port small porch. It's made out of concrete and wood. David Staley: I'd almost think it was a tiny house. Yeah. That are made today. George Rush: Yeah, exactly. It's, it would be small even for a tiny house. Yes. And so again, the, the conditions of display really dictated how I went about making this thing and, speaking of having no imagination, all I could think about was painting the building itself. And so, the idea really just came from doing a site visit to the building and then taking photographs of it at in the evening, and then I returned to my studio and I made paintings of the photographs of the building, which then I had framed and photographed, and then I printed out those photographs [00:15:00] onto very high quality paper, brought those prints to Germany and then hung them inside of the house. David Staley: So that's a print. George Rush: So what you're looking at, yeah, is a print of a photograph of a painting, of a photograph of the building itself. David Staley: Have you done anything like that before? That sort of, that sort of process? George Rush: I think meta sort of pictures, if you will, has definitely been something that's snuck into my work, but this is the most extreme version of it. The second part of the exhibition, if you will, are the walls behind that are holding up the prints. David Staley: Mm-hmm. George Rush: And I've painted them in gray stripes, and those gray stripes are a reference to a piece of artwork that's in the Albertinum Museum, which is a museum in Dresden that has, like, classical through contemporary work. The piece in the museum is an El Lissitzky piece called Dresden Cabinet. And, it is a wall that is built to [00:16:00] display other works of art. It was made in 1926. Hmm. Lissitzky was really interested in this blurring between painting, architecture, art, and I find him to be quite fascinating, and I love this idea of a wall to show other work. That seemed to be right in line with the way I'd been thinking for many years. So ,that's where the, the gray stripes come from. David Staley: As I've looked at some of your other work and as I'm looking here at _Dresden Cabinet, _would it be unfair to describe your painting as realist? George Rush: Yeah, I think it's... realism is a funny term. David Staley: You can hear the hesitation in my voice. George Rush: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's more representational, I would say. I, you know, realism, what is realism, right? Like in a way it's the, what I do is actually quite abstract because it has nothing to do with the actual thing. It's a flattened thing. It's from a photograph, it's very, very far away from its origin, but it's recognizable.[00:17:00] And I am interested in the history also of painting and, in what we call realist painting, representational painting. I'm very interested in the relationship between painting and photography. I think what I do is actually something sort of in between painting and photography, even though even if the final thing is often a painting or most often a painting it couldn't really exist without the photograph, and so it's dependent upon the photograph. David Staley: Hmm. Both _Dresden Cabinet_ and _Curtain__ Walls_, would you describe these as site specific works? George Rush: Absolutely. David Staley: Yeah. Yeah. How is that different, how is producing a site specific work different, say, from your typical process, say, working in your studio? George Rush: So, right now I'm just working in my studio, I have no exhibition on the horizon. I'm not sure where these works are going to end up that I'm making, and I don't really, in a sense, site specific is more a design problem. It feels a bit more like I have a [00:18:00] client or a problem that I have to solve, and I really love that aspect of it. It sort of works a different part of my brain than if I'm just in the studio. For me, art making a lot of the time is a kind of problem solving, and when the problem is clear, it can be quite enjoyable. When the problem's not clear or when the problem is messy, it can be kind of difficult. David Staley: Take us into your studio. What would we, what would we see if we visited you there? George Rush: So, these days, most of the work in my studio are small gouache paintings. David Staley: And tell us what gouache is? George Rush: Gouache is, and actually I use acrylic gouache, which isn't real gouache, but gouache is a water-based medium, dense, opaque color, dries quite quickly, and, is comes in tiny, small tubes. So, it's not great for big work, but it's terrific for small work. And what I do is I take thousands of photographs and then I choose from those hundreds, which I take a photograph, let's say, of a [00:19:00] street scene, and then I'll take it into Photoshop, turn it into a line drawing using Photoshop and then print it out onto paper and then I paint on onto that printout. Hmm. So there's a kind of drawing accuracy that's derived from the photograph. I could project it or grid it out, but I want to make many, many, many images. The show I had in Dayton in 2023 was 205 of these images. Oh. And they're all 11 by 14 inches. Each derived from a, a different photograph and they were they were made independently of the venue, but then they were displayed in a, in a grid that went all the way around this large gallery. So, what you would see is a pile of half finished paintings, a pile of you know, on paper, and literally like a hundred of them, the thing that I'm working on, the computer screen that I'm painting off of, and then the television, which I [00:20:00] watch TV while I paint. David Staley: Is that so ? George Rush: Yeah. David Staley: What do you watch? George Rush: Like police procedurals, things that aren't too visual. Almost like radio show or something. But I need something that shuts down the inner monologue while I'm painting. You know, the painting is quite automatic, if you will. It's quite mechanical and it uses one part of my brain to see and to do. But, if I'm just left to my own devices, I start thinking bad thoughts. David Staley: Hmm. But you, so you don't want the internal monologue? George Rush: No. There's no reason for eight hours to stand there and think about how OSU could be doing a better job. David Staley: Some of the pieces, and you'd mentioned this with curtain walls, some of the pieces are quite large. George Rush: Mm-hmm. David Staley: How does scale affect your process? George Rush: For many years, I made huge paintings, some of them, you know, 10 feet wide and those paintings, I had a very serious dialogue with the space and the [00:21:00] walls around them. In fact, I would paint the walls that they were displayed on to as a kind of diagram of a imagined architecture. That's not a very clear description, but the point is, is that the paintings had to have a kind of scale in order to hold the wall. David Staley: Hmm. George Rush: You know, and I was really interested in the sort of phenomena of standing in front of a painting where the objects and people in the paintings were painted about life size, where there was a kind of, all these paintings were of the interior of a fictional, modernist house with glass windows that had dappled light and other kinds of effects going on. And the paintings had to be large to not be an illustration, but instead to be in effect, you know, I wanted the paintings to do the thing optically that I was representing. But now I'm making really pretty small paintings of photographs that are even smaller off of the computer screen. And [00:22:00] there's something about those large paintings that started to become unwildly and didn't make sense as the world started to feel as if it was less and less secure. David Staley: Hmm. George Rush: So there was a kind of lack of, there was a sort of precarity that seemed to be really underway. Obviously, 2020 and so on and, although I started really with in 2016, I started feeling this way and I wanted to be able to make things that I could, if I needed to, this is a little bit melodramatic, but put in a box and get outta town with, you know, and I also didn't really feel as if it was appropriate to have these, like, giant things in the world. All of that's to say that then I made so many hundreds of these small things that I can't fit them all in a box anymore. But, the current work really is about a multitude of images coming together, and if they were five large paintings, it wouldn't be the same content as if [00:23:00] it's 205 small images that are from over the taken over the course of two and a half years. Can you see yourself going back to large paintings at some stage? I have a hard time imagining myself as being different than I am right now, and so, who knows? I mean, five years ago or seven years ago, I didn't imagine making small paintings. I thought I was just gonna keep making big paintings, so I don't know. I don't really, I try to not distract myself from what I'm doing in the present too much. David Staley: How do you hope your work is read by viewers, or does that enter into your thinking at all?, George Rush: Of course it enters into my thinking, but I don't have like a statement that I'm trying to get across. You know, I don't have a message that I want the work to impart so much. I hope that people look carefully at the work and slow down a bit and think about why perhaps something was made. How, how was it made what is it that they're looking at? Many, many, [00:24:00] many small paintings that I've made are things that I haven't seen. Painted before that are just in the world. You know, a plastic chair in the back of somebody's house. Maybe that's been painted before. But, you know, trying to I just want people to, to look at the work. David Staley: When did you first realize that you were gonna be a painter or an artist? Do you know when you were a a child this is what you were going to do? George Rush: Yeah, it's kind of what I always wanted to do, and then I got serious about it when I was about 16. David Staley: Serious how? George Rush: Before I was 16 I was kind of a delinquent ne'er-do-well and not doing well at school and not behaving well, and my dad bought me an easel and some oil paints. My father's a painter and I made a painting outside in the landscape in Vermont where he was living and, and it blew my mind. David Staley: Hmm. Who've been who've been your biggest influences, do you think? George Rush: Oh boy. That's sort of an impossible that's a tough question to [00:25:00] answer. I think when I was younger I could answer that question a lot better than I can now. Influence is an interesting thing and and that I have a longstanding dialogue with painters of the past. Somebody that was very influential to my thinking about how to go about making paintings was a guy named Fairfield Porter, but who's a mid-century American realist painter. Friends with the abstract expressionist, but not an abstract painter painted his home and his friends and the people around him in a really beautiful kind of French way. Heightened color heightened brush work and so on. But my paintings don't really look like his anymore. And I but I, I like the attitude of looking around and painting what you see and notice. So there've been lots and lots of influences, but that's, that's one that's, that's always been there. David Staley: Hmm. What are you working on now? What's the, what's the next [00:26:00] project? George Rush: It remains to be seen. I it may be another large group of images. So I'm, but I'm, I'm, right now I'm just making a whole bunch of small washes. I've been thinking more and more about landscape and I do have a I did get a grant from. Greater Columbus Arts Council to make some paintings about Columbus. Hmm. And particularly the sort of maybe neglected or un. Recognized or overlooked parts of Columbus. I think Columbus as a city is endlessly kind of fascinating in the fact that it's hard to grasp what it is. David Staley: Mm-hmm. George Rush: It doesn't seem to have much personality, but maybe that is its personality. And one of the things that it doesn't have is a lot of density and, you know, we're seeing some infill and some development going on. Which in general, I'm sort of supportive of, even though I don't like the way that we go about doing it anymore. You know, I, I'd like to see something a little more centralized, but one thing that is making me [00:27:00] think about is what gets lost in that in Phil. You know if you just go east of downtown, there are these sort of almost like abandoned lots and. It would make a lot of sense to build main streets and housing and shopping there, but at the same time, aesthetically, socially, economically, those spaces exist now in a cer, in a, in a, in a way that I think is kind of interesting. David Staley: Mm-hmm. George Rush: So I'm trying to, I'm trying to think about the places that might change. David Staley: Hmm. You said you were getting interested in landscape, in what way? George Rush: Just looking out, looking out. For so many years I painted interiors and and I'm from Brooklyn and, you know, I, I'm not a country person. I don't really understand nature. And when I say landscape, I don't necessarily mean like rural landscape, although that's interesting too. But I guess I've just been thinking more about, the [00:28:00] spaces around me rather than the things around me, or rather than the people around me. David Staley: Hmm. George Rush. Thank you. George Rush: Thanks. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.