Stephanie Rauschenbusch

STORY

I began to paint in elementary school, fashioning a huge bee in tempera/gouache.  Later I painted a red squirrel in oil at about age ten.  At this age, in fifth grade, I went to the Freer Museum in DC with my class at National Cathedral School and saw a Japanese screen with cherry blossoms covered by snow.  I wrote a poem about this, and I think my sense that museums could be wondrous places began there.

In Washington, DC there was the Phillips Collection to see—Cezanne, Bonnard, Vuillard, all the Nabis, on through Paul Klee and Rothko. Duncan Phillips would be sitting at the front desk to welcome us to his home. I also went with my parents to the National Gallery, then called “the Mellon.” 

When I started art classes in high school, I learned to stretch canvas and mix oil paints.  I worked in a Cubist style (I was always infatuated with Braque, another Phillips artist).  I didn’t learn about fugitive paint, though, and used far too much Shiva Rose.  Our teacher, Mrs. Bruskin, painted along with us, working on her Camden, Maine seascapes and harbor pictures.  

When I was fifteen or so, my mother paid for lessons one summer with George Hamilton, who taught In a loft in downtown DC.  He taught a sort of Impressionist color palate, with colors mixed from pale blue to dark purple, and from lemon yellow to brown. My mother had also taken me to France with her the previous summer, and I spent a month with a tutor visiting every museum in Paris, staying with her family in Brittany, and travelling with my mother all over southern France.  When I was sixteen I went on another European trip with the Commonwealth Youth movement, from Canada to Scotland and England and France.  I bought my first painting in Paris for $50.  It was an oil by Germaine Mongillat.

In college at Radcliffe/Harvard I continued to paint in my dorm room.  There were no fine art classes there. I’m rather sorry I didn’t take a lot of art history, though, which I now love.

I went to Columbia for graduate school in English and Comparative Literature with a Danforth Foundation fellowship that paid my tuition and rent.  I stayed there from 1964-70, writing an MA Thesis on the rough drafts of Hart Crane’s poems.  Though I received a summa cum laude degree, I found I could never read another Hart Crane poem.  I rented a studio on Amsterdam Avenue and began to paint completely on my own—usually still life paintings of lobster shells and lemons. I developed a style in which I recorded all the shadows that moved across the still life setup in one day. The paintings looked quite Cubistic.

It wasn’t until the 1980’s that I started to study at The New Brooklyn School, an offshoot of the Brooklyn Museum Art School.  I learned some tonal painting and a lot of drawing and anatomy. By then living in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, I started to rent studios in Soho, the Village, and eventually DUMBO. I became a member of the Board for the Women’s Caucus for Art and there met Sylvia Sleigh, Selena Trieff, Sabra Moore, Ora Lerman and many other feminists.  My subjects were now often autobiographical, while remaining mostly in the category of still life.

My “Family Portrait”, now at the Sylvia Sleigh collection at Rowan University, was a very large still life painting with a self-portrait figure and a portrait of my son as a small child. This was the painting written about by Kate Millett in her memoir of her Aunt Dorothy—A.D.  She saw it in my first show at Noho Gallery in Soho in 1982, a show reviewed also by John Russell of The New York Times. 

I was encouraged by this press coverage to try for a commercial gallery, ending up at Katarina Rich-Perlow, formerly A.M. Sachs.  This dealer did not sell my work and in a few years let me go. By 1980 I had to learned how to watercolor from studying with Mimi Weisbord.  From this point on I watercolored a great deal and was able to paint landscapes in plein air as well as still lives. In 1982-83 I had two summers in the Berkshires, one at the Cummington Art Colony. In 2000,

I spent three weeks in Cornwall, England at the Brisons Veor Residency and afterwards curated an exhibition at the Painting Center of all the women artists who had resided at Brisons including Marcia Clark, Sharyn Finnegan, Gail Edelman, Fran Hodes, Nancy Beal, and others.

I also curated two shows for the Women’s Caucus along with Fran Hodes— “Costumes, Masks, and Disguises” at the Clocktower and “Narrative Still Life’ at Marymount Manhattan College.

In the next few decades, I showed every two years at Noho Gallery and then at Prince Street Gallery in Chelsea.  My work sometimes veered toward working on a grid, especially for landscape.  But always I came back to a painterly realism.  I taught for many years at senior centers—watercolor, and at times terra cotta sculpture.

Along with my love of art came a love of poetry, starting back in fifth grade, when I wrote a poem about the cherry trees in the Freer.  I still write poetry and attend two peer groups which critique each other’s work.  I also write poetry reviews, and sometimes art book reviews, for American Book Review.

Now that I am 77, I still go almost every week to a museum in Manhattan.  I also have been a docent at the Brooklyn Museum for twelve years. My specialty is the realist work in the American Collection—Eakins, Homer, Marsden Hartley, Beaufort Delaney, and so forth.

I have been a President of NYSWA, and Treasurer of Noho Gallery as well as of the Brooklyn Watercolor Society.  I live in Windsor Terrace in a house surrounded by the paintings I’ve done and the work of many friends.  I’m a Quaker, and I think of my love of art and poetry and nature as a sort of natural mysticism.