Rebecca Purdum is a contemporary artist that was born in Idaho but studied at saint Martin’s School of Art and Design which so happened to be located in London, England.
Purdum is unique in the way that she paints. She uses a technique that involves covering her hands in gloves and carefully rubbing the paint onto the canvas as opposed to using brushes. The result is a vague and sometimes haunting blend of colors.
Susan Rothenburg had been born in Buffalo, New York and studied at Cornell university. Like Rebecca Purdum, Susan Rothenburg leaves a certain vagueness to her paintings.
Sussan Rothenburth, however, does not use gloves to create he paintings. Instead she combines two very opposite kinds of art: Representational and nonrepresentational. She uses images found in the visual plane but breaks them up so that they are not whole and easily identifiable. An example of this style can be found in her painting Maggie’s Ponytail. The painting depicts arms that are reaching out to grasp a chunk of hair while another hand in the lower right hand side of the painting holds up a ring or ponytail.
If it had not been described in this way, I do not believe that many people would see the image right away. Even now, I have to think about the painting for a moment or two before admitting that the description does indeed make sense.
I think both artists’ paintings are beautiful. Both seem very simplistic and vague but they also both manage to draw people into them. In addition, both possess some form of nonrepresentational art, whether it is fully nonrepresentational like Purdumn’s paintings, or a combination as seen in Rothenburg’s.
I also happen to think that if you combined the two paintings the result could be stunning. I imagine the result would have a background similar to Rebecca’s Purdum’s paintings, with vague, misty colors spread over a canvas. Then the broken, also vague images of Susan Rothenburg’s paintings painted on top.
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