Technicolor Sublime at Weisman Museum of Art: A Conversation with Artist Ruth Pastine

The Weisman Museum’s latest exhibition, Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime, presents a captivating optical illusion that explores the phenomenological experience of color, light, and space. Native New Yorker Ruth Pastine creates works that challenge perception and subvert expectations. At first glance, her large-scale canvases appear to be minimalist gray fields, but as the natural light shifts through the gallery, hidden layers of vibrant complementary colors—reds against greens, blues against oranges—gradually reveal themselves. 

Ruth Pastine and Mark Roosa

While Pastine’s art draws inspiration from Southern California’s historic Light and Space movement, she brings a distinctive approach to her work. Whereas many artists in the movement relied on industrial materials such as plastics, resins, and neon to shape perception, Pastine achieves similar effects through oil painting, employing fine brushes, meticulous technique, and the subtle power of the human hand. In this conversation with Mark Roosa, dean of libraries and interim director of the Weisman Museum, Pastine discusses her background, formative influences, and the artwork that defines this exhibition.

Roosa: You have mentioned visionary chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul’s The Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors (1839) as being impactful on your aesthetic. Could you highlight ways in which your paintings and works on paper reflect this construct?

Pastine: I was introduced to Chevreul and his law of simultaneous contrast at the High School of Music & Art. Chevreul’s discoveries into the simultaneous contrast of complementary colors—red vs. green, blue vs. orange, yellow vs. violet—is at the forefront of investigating the mystery and rigor of engaging both optical juxtapositions and the chemical mixing of pigments.

Contrasting complementary colors created a philosophical platform for my fascination with contradiction and investigations into the interplay between opposing colors and value shifts. I’m drawn to working within refined parameters, and expanding upon proposed limitations affords limitless opportunity. I liken it to music, the most abstract creative practice—a finite system of notes and spaces, form and rhythm, symmetry and repetition, and yet there are vast centuries of diverse genres. I see limitations as paradoxes, an invitation to explore contradiction.

My explorations for the ongoing Gray Series employ nuanced blends of complementary color grays that highlight color and light’s elusive ineffability. I engage complementary colors to enhance optical luminosity and spatial depth and to extend the perceptual continuum with bold saturated pigments as well as subtle hues not easily identified.

Roosa: Your work is often associated with the Light and Space movement. How would you characterize this movement and your place within it?

Pastine: My work is based in geometric abstraction and minimalism. I extend the sensibilities of the 1960s Southern California Light and Space movement, which in general included artists who investigated perceptual phenomena and shared an interest in manipulating light as a medium to alter the perception of form, space, and surface.

My work brings key differences, such as my focus on the metaphysical aspects of consciousness and a reliance on traditional means of probing the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint applied with brushes. I evolve my artwork through series to invoke a contemplative connection between the works and the architectural spaces they occupy, creating an immersive viewing experience and heightened perception through resonant color relationships.

My work sets precedents for an experience and affords a perceptual and visceral call-and-response with the viewer. The installation and various light sources, including the changing light of day and seasons, help support the interplay between the artwork, the architecture, and the viewer’s optical adjustment to the phenomena of the paintings. Abstraction accesses the subconscious and ineffable. It’s present, timeless, and exponentially connecting. It’s exactly what it is.

Roosa: Growing up in New York City, an epicenter for contemporary art, must have been a great experience. Who were some of the artists who influenced your creative directions?

Pastine: As a native New Yorker raised in Manhattan, I had significant access to world-renowned cultural institutions and museums such as the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, and the SoHo and 57^th Street galleries. My life revolves around art.

Josef Albers, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Vincent van Gogh, Kazimir Malevich, Agnes Martin, John McLaughlin, Claude Monet, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Anne Truitt are several artists whose work inspired me to advance my minimalist color field paintings and engage my philosophical interests in the sublime.

I was a child when I first saw Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) at MoMA and was confounded by this modest modernist painting. Later, I studied Suprematism, De Stijl, and Bauhaus teachings... Malevich’s deceptively simple work presented as a groundbreaking minimalist icon as I advanced my own abstract minimalist work.

However, it was also my early introduction to art history and color theory at the High School of Music & Art that challenged artistic traditions and fundamentally shaped my aspiration to make painting my life’s work. It was revelatory when I recognized that the interaction of color was a vast exploration into the phenomenology and conscious experience of color, defining the premise “color as content.”

At the time, I was also drawn to Italian Renaissance painting, especially Fra Angelico’s frescoes. I responded to the presence of spiritual content through the tender touch of painting—illumination—and the iconographic use of color housed in definitively formal structures. I saw that by engaging multiple panels via diptychs, triptychs, and quadriptychs, I could create a contemplative, almost meditative connection between the artwork and architectural space.

Visitors at Ruth Pastine: Technicolor Sublime Exhibition

 

Roosa: Is there a particular period covered by the works in the exhibit? Is there a back story surrounding the creation of these stunning works you might wish to share with our visitors?

Pastine: In 2023, Andrea Gyorody, former director of the Weisman Museum, invited me to have a solo exhibition, which subsequently coincided with the international release of my 20-year monograph published by Skira. This meaningful opportunity inspired me to create new large-scale paintings and a suite of soft pastels on paper for the Lightscapes Series that is on view alongside the recent six-panel Presence Absence spectrum, the Light as Air Series, and a selection of Depths Series oils on paper, all of which have never been exhibited.

As I work in series, there’s focused orchestration as I move and shift the canvases around the studio discerning new ways to proceed. It’s critical to observe the paintings evolve in concert and in juxtaposition with one another. My creative process embraces the dance, a counterbalance, between the known and the unknown, intention and the flow of spontaneous investigations—and the revelations—present new systems and structures to advance new work.

The sage understanding to take a chance. Being in that free fall of uncertainty is essential to my process of discovery; there are moments of absolute awe and beauty.

Roosa: Commingled with your works are select paintings by Josef Albers (1888–1976) and John McLaughlin (1898–1976). What sort of dialogue do you hope will transpire between these works and yours? What connections do you hope viewers will make from these juxtapositions?

Pastine: Recently, the Weisman Museum restored four John McLaughlin paintings and two Josef Albers Homage to the Square paintings. Dr. Gyorody was planning an exhibition of geometric hard-edge abstract paintings by these two artists among others when she came to my studio. Seeing my soft-edge minimalist color field paintings on canvas and new works on paper prompted her to shift her plans, deciding to situate my work with these two predecessors. I hope that my practice will share a counterpoint for being in the contemplative and expansive present moment of discovery, which abstraction can afford.

Roosa: We are looking forward to the publication of your monograph, Ruth Pastine: Limitless. Can you provide us with a preview of what the publication will cover?

Pastine: This monograph features highlights from numerous series of paintings and works on paper spanning the last 20 years, culminating with the most recent Lightscapes Series. Included is an interview with Julie Perlin Lee, director of the Laguna Art Museum, in which I express that I’ve come to understand that my work is meditation and mediation, rigorous in mind and method.

I trust that I come to my creative practice not knowing how the work will resolve. There’s truly no knowing the future with anything, and with that I embrace mindfulness to silence my mind from its attempts to determine future outcomes. We’re all best served without preconceived convictions of what we’re going to see and feel. The universality of being in the here and now. My process affords being in the vastness of the moment, and the paintings come from this spaciousness. It’s my hope the work affords this experience, an opportunity to engage, reckon, and revel with the profound experience of human existence.