Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008 by Klaus Ottman, with essay by Sarah Rothenberg and interview by Terrie Sultan, D. Giles Limited and the Parrish Art Museum

To many, the painter Rackstraw Downes might appear to be a traditionalist. The British-born, American-based artist’s work is steeped in realism, after all. But a new catalog out this month, Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, published on the occasion of his major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum from June 20th through August 8th, is certain to shed light on his complex, often unconventional practice. Through essays, an interview, and a host of full-page images, Downs emerges as an astute observer, quietly and powerfully documenting the surrounding reality of modern life that goes unnoticed by most, in his urban and industrial interiors and exteriors. The artist only paints from life, but he plays with perspective and space just enough to delve beyond reality.

In his essay “The Verity of Art: Rackstraw Downes’s Onsite Paintings,” the show’s curator Klaus Ottman, of the Parrish Museum, offers a highly detailed analysis of Downes’s painterly technique as well as his influences, which range in scope from 17th-century Flemish landscape painter Jacob Van Ruisdael to the abstract training he received at Yale in the 1960s. Ottman gives the reader a glimpse at Downes as an artist not mired in sentimentality, despite the seemingly romantic way he works, venturing out daily with his easel and oils, refusing to touch up the slightest detail in his studio and risk painting something from memory rather than live. “For Downes,” he explains, “painting is a constant negotiation between truth to life and truth to art.”

In her essay “Unfolding Time into Space: The Paintings of Rackstraw Downes,” Sarah Rothenberg, artistic director of Houston’s Da Camera, describes how Downes goes beyond photorealism and plein-air painting to depict a kind of composite of moments “in opposition to the lens of the camera, offering an alternative scheme for transferring the ‘sphere of real space’ to a flat surface.” The relationships between reality, space, and movement unfold in the 25 full-color plates that accompany the essays.

The book concludes with an interview conducted by Parrish Art Museum director Terrie Sultan, in which Downes very frankly discusses specific works, as well as his methods and experiences. “I did, but I never used the photographs,” Downes characteristically tells Sultan when she asks if he used a camera to record a building on the brink of demolition that caught his eye. “My painting is really about trying to capture something that’s uncapturable.” Downes’s “uncapturable” subjects and his fantastically anachronistic painting technique are clearest when summed up in the artist’s own words: “Every building, even the lousiest building, has character to me, and I’m trying to get that character, that form. I paint just as a dancer… and show you its essence by the movements he or she took in the dance.”