General Sherman
2006–2013
Ruttenberg’s works are always layered compositions. In this slideshow, we catch a glimpse of those layers beneath the surface.
Once I visited her studio when it was crowded with vases full of blossoming pear tree branches that she was portraying all across the foreground of General Sherman as finishing touches in preparation for the Museum of the City of New York exhibition. She explained that the individual flowers were themselves so exquisite that she felt obliged to show them close-up in her painting, despite how the circle of blossoming pear trees at the very center of her monumental composition is located much too far away for anyone to see the individual little flowers.
Charles Stuckey, Every Day in the Park with Janet, 2014
General Sherman puddle