Tom Wolfe might have said you can’t go home again, but for artist Brian Rutenberg, going home is a daily part of his work, no matter where he resides.

Rutenberg, a Myrtle Beach native now living in New York, came home—literally —in September for the opening of his exhibit, Brimming Tide: Paintings and Drawings by Brian Rutenberg, at the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum. Though he makes the physical journey to the Grand Strand only a few times a year, Rutenberg expresses an essential part of his South Carolina Lowcountry upbringing nearly every day, in his New York art studio.  

Before Rutenberg began his formal training, which included earning a BFA from the College of Charleston in 1987 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1989, he spent his childhood days exploring the marshes, rivers and wetlands along the Grand Strand. These early experiences left a permanent impression on him and became the core of his ambition as an artist. “That’s what first interested me, in terms of color and light around water and the particular kind of light in marshes and rivers,” Rutenberg explains. “Those are the things that made me a painter long before I had the opportunity to explore museums or enter an art program.”  

Rutenberg’s representations of the Lowcountry landscape are abstract rather than literal, so viewing his work is about experiencing the paintings rather than recognizing lifelike forms. He approaches his work “not from a pictorial standpoint—as in, ‘this is an artificial experience, which stems from a real experience.’ My job is to turn that real experience into something that’s truthful. It’s not what you see but what you feel and what you know; it’s more complex and enduring. It has nothing to do with the visible world. Even though there are little links, it’s not meant to be a ‘picture’ of anything.” In other words, Rutenberg says, “My work is not about the reliving of an experience; it is about the total possessing of it.”

Brimming Tide, which runs through January, is Rutenberg’s second exhibit at the art museum. In the 13-year interim since his first show, the artist’s body of work, as well as his public exposure and artistic achievements, has grown exponentially. He’s done solo exhibitions in galleries in Charlotte, Atlanta, San Francisco and New York, and at museums such as the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans; and the Yale University Art Gallery in Connecticut.

Critics and contemporaries hail Rutenberg’s work for its lush color and rich textures, as well as the artist’s ability to portray on canvas not only light and shadow, but the very air he breathes. Kay Teer, curator at the Art Museum, calls his works “luscious. They’re expansive, they’re colorful, they’re full of light. He can capture air and somehow put it on a canvas unlike any contemporary artist I’m aware of.”

Myrtle Beach artist Sigmund Abeles, whose relationship with Rutenberg has spanned decades, recalls a conversation the two had in their formative artistic years:  “[Rutenberg] said one thing I shall never forget: ‘From early on, even as a child using watercolors, I could see air; yes, I could see and then taught myself to paint the air.’”    

Rutenberg’s continued focus on the light and color of the Lowcountry, even after residing in New York for more than two decades, demonstrates that he’s working not directly from memory of the landscape, but from an inner impulse to recover the essence of his early years. The truth he’s seeking in his work “comes from childhood—the sheer wonder of childhood and its insatiable curiosity,” says Rutenberg. “It’s a sense of longing that keeps me going, that unfulfilled sense of longing that I strive for, that I’ll never achieve. I always feel like it will be the next painting that will finally satisfy that longing—that’s what keeps me going.”

Numerous mentors in varied artistic fields have influenced Rutenberg at different stages in his career, beginning at the College of Charleston when he studied under William Halsey. It was Halsey who first encouraged Rutenberg to “break loose and use intense color and thick, juicy paint,” according to Abeles.

Though Rutenberg has won awards and fellowships throughout his career, though he’s published a book and been honored with hundreds of exhibits throughout the country, the end goal for him is still the same: for his childhood voice to be heard. “All those external things have been wonderful, but the little kid that wanted to possess the world around him, and find a way to do something with what I felt, is still inside of me.  It’s still about trying to speak clearly in this language, the language of paint.”