Interview with Artist David Rubin

Back to exhibit

“Everybody starts off coloring, I just never stopped.”

Rubin grew up in New York City. “I was always drawing and I always had supplies – my mother encouraged me and bought me “Painting for Young People” when I was still an infant. “ Growing up, he was surrounded by art whether it was the Picasso and Modigliani prints in the house or the collections in local museums. “My first museum experience was the Museum of Natural History in New York. My grandparents lived seven blocks south of the museum and when they’d babysit, that is where we went.” While in high school Rubin got into classical art, attending the New York Students League on Saturdays. He would skip school on Fridays to go to the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick. Then on Mondays he’d stay home to draw. “Eventually the school called my Dad…”

In 1983 he moved to Ketchikan. Then in 1987, he went back to White Plains, New York for a year to study at the Frank Reilly League of Artists where he studied under Cesaré Borgia, one of Frank Reilly’s students. Frank Reilly was a famous American portrait painter, illustrator, muralist, and teacher most noted for his method of organizing the palette around the Gem Assayers Chart and the scientific components of light: hue (the actual color itself: red, blue, green); value (the colors darkness or lightness) and intensity (the colors dullness or brightness).

People and landscapes are what he is interested in painting most. “The people, their faces inspire me. As far as landscapes – ooh, that looks beautiful, I’d like to paint it.” In his painting Amputees Visit the Temple of Venus and Ponder the Ideal of Beauty – “I was looking at the Torso of Venus, held by our civilization to be an ideal of beauty, and wondered how an amputee or someone born without limbs feels when they see this figure without arms, legs and in some cases, no head.” Although some of his work is entirely imaginary or more abstract, he tries to make all of it look like it obeys the laws of nature and light.

“In S.E. a lot of art is oriented to tourists – having this show at the museum frees you up, lets you do things for a different audience.”

Rubin’s work has changed and developed over the years. While at the Reilly School, his palette followed the Reilly palette which is based on reds, yellows, oranges, more warm color and browns. Moving to Alaska, Rubin found he needed to develop a different palette based on red, blue, yellow – primary colors, and black and white. A turning point in his career came in 1983 when Hall Anderson, photographer for the Ketchikan Daily News, put his painting “Ketchikan - Average Yearly Rainfall 162.27” on the front of the Arts section.

Rubin always works in oils, unless he is painting on frames, which he does in acrylic. Recently, he also created a bronze monument, The Rock, composed of seven life-sized bronze figures. The monument honors seven figures from Ketchikan's past: Chief Johnson, The Logger; The Fisher, The Miner, The Aviator, A Native Woman Elder, and an Elegant Lady.

A working artist for many years, Rubin says the challenges vary from piece to piece. Speaking again of the Amputees Visit the Temple of Venus he says it was a struggle to find models, to find reference material for the dome, to find the right sized canvas. Not all difficulties are material. As with many artists, he finds that many pieces reach a point where “they look like they weren’t even painted by a human being.” To get past that point, he says he just keeps going. He quotes Monet as saying, “A painting is a series of corrections.”

Rubin teaches art in Ketchikan twice a week. He believes in teaching the academic way, in teaching people how to draw first. “Everyone draws when they are kids. “ As to his advice for aspiring artists - “I ask my students, ‘Have you ever been to a museum and seen a really great painting?’ Most of them haven’t; they’ve only seen reproductions, but it’s totally different seeing a real painting. Seeing the surface, seeing the actual size; sometimes a painting you thought was huge turns out to be tiny but you realize that a tiny painting can have a huge impact. You see a blob of white paint up close becomes this perfect highlight as you back away. Growing up in NY, I would go to museums all the time. The first time you see a van Gogh and see that it’s, like, 2” thick, you realize it’s actually a sculpture…”