Monumental Central Park Watercolor Studies
2018
In the studio video shown above, two assistants unroll a series of lower halves from Janet Ruttenberg's Sheep Meadow watercolor studies. The video presents a small selection of the entire series. In total, there are more than 97 sets of these monumental watercolor studies.
Janet Ruttenberg has been painting watercolors in Central Park since the early 2000s. Working on giant rolls of paper stretched across the grass, she paints with brushes affixed to long extension poles, pushing the boundaries of traditional en plein air landscape painting in both scale and technique.
Painting in a public park on 15-foot scrolls, elements unfold at two disparate tempos that must be held together in a single frame. There's the slow vertical changes in the urban environment, and the fast moving figures that punctuate and give meaning to the landscape.
These are the kind of painterly problems that Ruttenberg refers to as “the code” she’s looking to crack. By painting the entire scene, split across two rolls of paper, the artist has the flexibility to paint the top half or the bottom, individually, or to take both with her into the park.
Janet Ruttenberg Studio documentation, Photograph by Sarah Bertalan, 2017
For Ruttenberg, the watercolor paintings have always been a way into the larger oil works she creates in the studio. These paintings operate on a different timeline altogether, shaped by the slow drying of the oil medium and the complexity of their multimedia integrations — including video projection, animation, and neon. In this way, the watercolor studies stand both as an independent body of work and as essential components in Ruttenberg’s long-term vision from a single point in Sheep Meadow.