Rodney Carswell (born 1946) is an American abstract artist. He first gained recognition for human-scaled, geometric paintings that feature exposed, projected support structures, creating interplay between sculptural presence and richly painted pictorial surfaces.Warren, Lynne. "Rodney Carswell," Art in Chicago 1945-1995. Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 247. Retrieved May 1, 2018.Artner, Alan G. "Material Issues," Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1993, Arts Section, p. 14-15. His recent paintings eschew the superstructures and evoke a greater sense of immediacy, playfulness, and narrative.Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. RAIR | 2011-12, Rodney Carswell. Retrieved May 7, 2018. Critics often describe Carswell's work as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate "in-between" spaces and embrace contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front.Pagel, David. "Rodney Carswell: Exacting the Balance," Rodney Carswell Selected Works, 1975-1993, catalogue, Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1993.Adcock, Craig. "Rodney Carswell," exhibition essay, Feigen Incorporated, 1995.Spector, Buzz. "Unions of Color and Form: the Paintings of Rodney Carswell," catalogue, University of Oklahoma Museum of Art, 1988. Employing irregularly shaped canvasses, thick supports, and openings or holes that reveal the stretcher construction and walls behind them, works like 3 (In 4) (1994) often occupy a place between painting and sculpture.Sultan, Terrie. "Painting Outside Painting Exhibition Catalogue of the 44th Biennial of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. 1995, p. 26–7.Doe, Donald Bartlett. "Plane Truth: Three Contemporary Artists," catalogue', Washburn University: The Mulvane Art Museum, 1991. In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernist languages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories with postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and with his process-oriented, "hand-made" surfaces.Kirshner, Judith Russi. "Rodney Carswell" in Painting Outside Painting, exhibition catalog, 44th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1995, p. 42-3. In his essay for Carswell's mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their way into one's consciousness in a "supple, somewhat unsettling manner" that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception.
Carswell has been featured in additional solo exhibitions at the University of Oklahoma Museum of Art and Miami University Museum of Art, as well as in key surveys at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA).Corcoran Gallery of Art. Painting Outside Painting, exhibition catalog, 44th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, 1995, p. 91. His work has been widely covered in art magazinesHixson, Kathryn. "Rodney Carswell," Flash Art, March–April, 1995, Vol. 28, No. 1, p. 106-07 such as Artforum,Risatti, Howard, "Painting Outside of Painting," Artforum, April 1996, p. 195-6. Art in America,Snodgrass, Susan, "Rodney Carswell at the Renaissance Society," Art In America, January 1994, p. 111. ARTnews,Goodman, Jonathan, "Painting Outside Painting," ARTnews, April, 1996. and the New Art Examiner,Ostrow Saul, "History is Now", The New Art Examiner, March 1996, pp. 29-31. and major publications including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.Smith, Roberta, "Testing the Limits at the Corcoran," The New York Times, January 6, 1996, p. 11–3.Artner, Alan G. "Rodney Carswell," Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1992, Sect. 7, p. 70.Wilson, William, "Rodney Carswell at Roy Boyd," Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1987, Part IV, p. 12.Plagens, Peter, "Peeling Paint," Newsweek, January 15, 1996, p. 66. He has been recognized with fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim and Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his art practice, Carswell has taught and lectured on art and opened and operated a successful restaurant in Chicago.
Life and career Rodney Carswell was born in Carmel, California in 1946 and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After completing high school at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, he studied art at the University of New Mexico (UNM) with professors John Pearson, Van Deren Coke and Garo Antresian, earning a BFA in 1968. After graduating, Carswell married Renee Dubois, traveled in Europe, and then enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he worked with professors George Woodman and Roland Reiss, and received an MFA in 1972.
Following graduate study, Carswell began teaching at Illinois State University (1972–1980) and exhibiting throughout the Midwest. He was selected for the Art Institute of Chicago's prestigious "Chicago and Vicinity" show in 1973 and later picked up by Roy Boyd Gallery.The Art Institute of Chicago. Seventy-fourth Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity catalogue, Chicago, 1973. In 1980, the Carswells moved to New York City, where they worked various blue-collar jobs and Renee gave birth to their daughter, Calida, in 1983.Hammer, Ethel. "The Fine Art of Breakfast," Chicago Reader, December 20, 2001. Retrieved May 8, 2018. Later that year, they returned to the Midwest when he secured a position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he would teach art and serve in several administrative capacities, until retiring in 2007.
Throughout this period, Carswell showed regularly, at galleries including Roy Boyd (Chicago and Los Angeles), Linda Durham (New Mexico), Feigen, Thomas McCormick, and Devening Projects (all three Chicago).The Renaissance Society. Rodney Carswell Selected Works, 1975-1993, catalogue, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993. His work was featured in museums throughout the United States, including these major shows: Corcoran Gallery 44th Biennial, "Painting Outside of Painting" (1995); MCA Chicago, "Art in Chicago 1945-95" (1996); and Terra Museum, "Surfaces: Two Decades of Chicago Painting" (1987).Terra Museum of American Art. Surfaces: Two Decades in Chicago Painting, Seventies and Eighties, Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 1987.
In 1998, the Carswells opened a Latino-flavored restaurant in his former studio space, called Flo, that they operated until late 2011, when Carswell returned to his roots in New Mexico. He was a resident at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program (2011–12), before moving back to Santa Fe, where he currently lives and works.
Work Largely emerging in a period in which it was commonly held that "painting was dead,"Crimp, Douglas. "The End of Painting," October, Vol. 16, Spring 1981 p. 69–86. Retrieved May 11, 2018. Carswell's body of work has been deemed noteworthy for his "unwavering belief in art as an act of individual scrutiny and contemplation," "remarkable consistency of purpose," and "relentless pursuit of subtle variation."Wiens, Ann, "On View," New Art Examiner, May, 1993, vol. 20, no. 9, p. 36-37.
Carswell has said that "reductive abstraction" has been integral to his work dating back to his art education in the late 1960s, when iconic minimalists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman were at their most influential.Smith, Michael Bill, "Profile of the Artist Rodney Carswell," The Art Founders Project, November 9, 2012. Retrieved May 8, 2018. Ultimately, he felt a greater kinship with artists identified as post-minimalists, such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Graves and Joel Shapiro, preferring their idiosyncratic styles of abstraction and engagement with the body, the hand-crafted and process over minimalism's embrace of non-referentiality and the mechanical.Stone, Andree. "Content of Abstraction," exhibition essay, Chicago: Illinois Art Gallery, 1995.University of Oklahoma Museum of Art. "Rodney Carswell," catalogue, University of Oklahoma Museum of Art, 1988. In interviews, Carswell has said he was "trying to get the human element more in evidence"McCracken, David, "Rodney Carswell on Painters and Painting," Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1988. Retrieved May 10, 2018. and making "visible the way an artist—myself, in this case—has behaved toward the object. The idea is to have the nature of the material and the act performed on the material both be evident in the object that results."
In his early work, this often took the form of what some critics called "irreverent constructions," such as Martha (1977): painted fields of unstretched canvas that Carswell cut into geometric sail-like forms and attached directly to walls. Although abstract, these works were intended in their scale and positioning close to the floor to suggest a figural presence or "echo" of the viewer.Artner, Alan G. "Rodney Carswell Continues To Enlarge On Abstraction," Chicago Tribune, January 19, 1995. Retrieved May 10, 2018. Carswell also engaged the paintings as objects, in terms of their unconventional shapes and thin, minimal presence without stretcher bars. By the late 1970s, influenced by the work of Ron Gorchov, he decided to explore this issue in a more robust way, leading to a breakthrough in his work.
Mature work Carswell began constructing visible support armatures that jutted into three-dimensional space, giving paintings like St. Tropez (1978) a commanding sculptural presence.The Renaissance Society. "Rodney Carswell: Selected Works 1975-1993,", image, St. Tropez (1978). Retrieved May 11, 2018. In New York, he continued to develop these structures while also shifting to a thicker, built-up and scraped-down surface application of oil paint and wax (encaustic). By the late-1980s, he achieved his mature style in works like Black and White Cross Encircled by Red (1988), employing a spare lexicon of emblematic forms (crosses, semicircles, squares, rectangles), thick exposed supports, interlocking planes and shaped or assembled canvasses, that he painted in vivid, unmodulated colors with rich, layered surfaces.Kirshner, Judith Russi. "Surfaces: Two Decades in Chicago Painting, Seventies and Eighties," Surfaces: Two Decades in Chicago Painting, Seventies and Eighties, Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 1987. His formal experimentation would include geometric openings or holes that pierced the canvasses—"diagramming" paintings by revealing their construction and relationship with the walls behind them as he did in Two Grays and Orange Around an Empty Rectangle (1988)The Renaissance Society. "Rodney Carswell: Selected Works 1975-1993,", image, Two Grays and Orange Around an Empty Rectangle (1988). Retrieved May 11, 2018.—or displaying both backs and fronts of painted panels, as in 3 (5) Panels, Presented and Reversed (1993). Carswell described these works as "integrated pictorial objects [...] at once physical and logical, ephemeral and phenomenal."