Rackstraw Downes

Rackstraw Downes (born 1939) is a British-born realist painter and author. His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, socially provocative narratives depicting human industry's engagement with the environment, and compositional rigor manifest in the balancing of structural abstraction and perspectival extension. ["He like jam-ups of culture and nature, where practical human uses overlap with indifferent geology and shaggy flora--he is the bard of weeds." Peter Schjeldahl, "The New Yorker", quoted by Schwartz, Sanford; Storr, Robert, and Downes, Rackstraw. "Rackstraw Downes". Princeton University Press, April 2005.]

Education

Born Rodney Harry Rackstraw Downes in Pembury, Kent, England, he moved to the United States and studied painting as an exchange student at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut from 1957-58. [Schwartz, Sanford, et al, 2005, page 175.] He then returned to England and attended Cambridge University, where he received a B.A. in English literature. Back in the United States, he studied at the Yale School of Art with Neil Welliver, Al Held and Alex Katz, and received an M.F.A. in painting in 1964.

Work

His friendship with Welliver led to the purchase of a farm in Maine in 1964, where he began drawing the landscape, thus changing direction from the non-representational manner of his student work. In 1965 Downes moved to New York City. Over the next several years he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and later, at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Though he is primarily based in New York City, where he has painted numerous cityscapes, Downes has traveled widely, creating a significant number of landscape paintings on site in Maine and Texas, of subjects including the harbor of Portland, Maine and the Donald Judd structures in Marfa, Texas. He has also painted interiors of a panoramic scale similar to his landscapes. [ [http://www.artcritical.com/DavidCohen/SUN70.htm Cohen, David, "Gallery Going", The New York Sun] ] Downes' paintings are characterized by their vastness of scope as much as their attention to detail: they are composed of a fused sequence of visual observations, their horizontal lines 'bending' so as to acknowledge the earth's curvature and the limitations of two-point perspective when applied to wide-angle views. [Schwartz, Sanford, et al, 2005, page 72.]

He has written for The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, The New Criterion, and other publications. He also edited "Art In Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism", 1935-1975, a collection of Fairfield Porter's writing. Downes' writing has been published in two small paperbacks: "In Relation to the Whole", which features three essays; "Under The Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal", a documentation of his painting process; and in his own monograph, "Rackstraw Downes".

Downes received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. In 1999 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Collections

Downes' work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He is represented by the Betty Cunningham Gallery in New York.

Publications

*Schwartz, Sanford; Storr, Robert, and Downes, Rackstraw. "Rackstraw Downes". Princeton University Press, April 2005

*"Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal: The making of two paintings". 5.9.99 - 11.15.99. New York, Turning theHead Press, 2000

*"In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays from Three Decades - 1973, 1981, 1996". New York, Edgewise Press, 2000

References

External links

* [http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O:AD:E:1605&page_number=1&template_id=6&sort_order=1 Museum of Modern Art]
* [http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com The Betty Cuningham Gallery]