Ken Rush—Summer Days
Mona Lisa as a swimming pool? In a recent post, Ken Rush’s “Mona’s Pool” was featured in my commentary on “It’s Smaller Than I Thought,” a current exhibition at Safe and Sound Gallery in Burlington VT. The very same Ken Rush just opened a solo exhibition at 3 Pears Gallery in Dorset, VT. My synopsis was published by The Arts Fuse earlier this week. Click here to read (you’ll need to scroll to the end, and maybe check out The Arts Fuse while you’re there) or read below.
Ken Rush—Summer Days
What happens when an artist known for beguiling landscapes studded with utility poles and Vermont barns turns his attention elsewhere? Ken Rush, of Brooklyn, New York, has just opened his biennial exhibition Ken Rush—Summer Days at 3 Pears Gallery, Dorset VT, through August 15. There is still an iconic red barn or two, but his latest series, somewhat improbably, focuses on swimming pools.
Rush explains his left turn by citing the pandemic, which encouraged him to reflect and re-imagine. The result was the production of an impressive number of new works during the past year. Isolated in his studio, he thought back to his youth and found himself remembering how swimming pools were popular venues for socializing. His new works are often populated with tiny human figures — another departure for Rush — alone, or in companionable small groups. In “Afternoon at the Club,” he presents an image of a pool around which people are gathered at a country club. That kind of human density was either what the pandemic-weary craved — or feared — the most.
Rush turned to Hollywood for further inspiration, watching films with pool scenes, such as The Swimmer and The Graduate. Regarding the latter, he was drawn to the protagonist’s sense of being “in between” the past of college and the as-yet-undetermined future. (The famous “plastics”scene). The pandemic had a similar feel — a past world shuttered, a future uncertain, yet to be defined. One painting,“Afloat (Marnie),” supplies a bird’s eye perspective of a lone swimmer dozing on a raft. Inspired by a scene from a Hitchcock film, it does not lack that director’s trademark soupçon of dread.
Rush’s style is different in this exhibit as well. His barns tend toward the tactile, paint thickly applied as though with a palette knife. These swimming pools are built out of saturated colors — a thin wash of glaze adds shadow. In the past, Rush worked in the rectangular, but decided for this exhibition to embrace (at least in part) the tondo. The circularity of the paintings mimics how the eye shapes its field of vision, the artist self-consciously playing against the angled corners and stairs of pools.
—Susan B. Apel for The Arts Fuse, Boston, July 22, 2021.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word