Russ Rubin

My current series, ‘Temporary Cure for Existential Dread,’ aspires to induce your daze. These paintings are at once visual moments of peace and invitations to adventure, worlds into which the viewer might hurl themself, if only for an instant. 

In the crushing wake of a failed novel, I stumbled onto a curiously contoured vintage frame at a VFW tag sale in the Hudson Valley. This I traced onto panel and cut out with a jigsaw before drawing straight to the wood, following at times the native grain, then deviating completely and painting in with tans, blues, and burnt reds, smoky pinks and sages, leaving windows onto the wood before filling with frosted black and patterning to taste, resulting in a collision of the natural and subconscious worlds as seen through the dusky desert prism of my mind.

Following this thread has combined my deep-seeded love for the hunt, for the old, the vintage and discarded with my need for visual exploration and diversion in the face of said novel, the pandemic, and screaming unsleeping children, resulting in the weird portals you see here, designed, perhaps, for nothing so much as my own escape. 

The idea that these hunks of wood, paint, and old frames might achieve that for you, that you too might find a sense of respite in these works, the menthol numb of a mindless stare off into the distance, bucks me up for the next search and dive into the great grainy unknown.