The Living Still Life
A Daughter’s Observations

Essay by Judi Rotenberg’s daughter, Abigail Ross Goodman. Excerpted from the catalogue published in conjunction with the 2022 exhibition of the same name, held at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, MA, April 30 – July 3, 2022.

My earliest memories include my mother’s studio which, when I was very young, was located in the basement of our house. Despite the bare concrete walls, the boiler, an old work bench, an extra refrigerator, and a collection of various and sundry items that needed storage, the space seemed a wonderland. There were black and white tubes of Liquitex paint lined up on the shelf just beneath her easel’s crank, the surface covered with the residue of their contents: alizarin crimson, cadmium orange red, cadmium red light, cadmium yellow, ultramarine, cerulean blue, fuchsia, white and so on, left by my mother’s hands when she would reach for a bit more of this or that. Soaring above these tantalizing vessels were her canvases, monumental to me, brimming with the life she captured in her compositions. For most of her mature career, my mother, Judi Rotenberg, has focused her talents on stilling time, fixing bouquets of flowers when they are most lush and seductive.

Still life painting—from the Dutch persuasion of the 17th century (Figure 1), to Cezanne—is one of the most sacrosanct art subjects. Yet, since the arrival of Abstract Expression in the 1950s, in contemporary art circles still lives are frequently relegated to the status of cliché and pastiche, denigrated from a critical perspective precisely for the reasons that my mother has always loved to paint them. Mostly, still lives are not required to lead with conceptual underpinnings. Artists who choose the still life as their primary matter do so in order to focus upon their subjects’ representational and painterly possibilities and to attend to the immediacy and energy in what they see before them. My mother has always had the distinct gift of readily capturing the life force of her subjects, and, in return, the act of painting has always reinvigorated her.

Predominantly a studio artist working in acrylics and watercolor, my mother typically paints at a large scale, composing her subjects for strength, and confidently applying color as it exists both in the scene and in her eye—that is to say she has an internal navigation towards a certain palette, frequently cooler in tone. Though life-sized (or just larger) explorations of volumetric arrangements, she speaks of her paintings as collective portraits of the individual flowers themselves. For as long as I can remember, visits to the studio have been spent with her pointing out the distinct qualities of each bloom: this one is proud and upright, this one sagging and tired, and so on. (She also happens to be an extremely talented painter of people—rendering her sitters’ quintessential characteristics so clearly that one could almost imagine the paintings become animated.) What is clear across all aspects of her practice is that primary observation is as critical as composition and color.

Observation is an essential idea as it relates to my mother—both in her paintings, and more holistically. The game eye-spy was a central activity at our dinner table and when traveling. She was determined to teach her three children how to see. This was passed down from her father, the American Impressionist Harold Rotenberg, who would frequently direct us to “look at the blue of that sky,” “pay attention to that shadow,” “see how these two greens are different.” Bestowing visual acuity as a kind of faith is one version of l’dor v’dor,1 from generation to generation, for Rotenbergs. That my mother and her father are and were, respectively, also people of spiritual faith is hardly surprising; it is nearly impossible to appreciate all of the visual wonders of this realm and not believe in the possibility of something beyond our certainty. And so the observation of the world became a bridge to ritual observation. My mother prays on, and off, of the canvas.

Training at Boston University in the 1960s (Figure 2), she was taught to stretch her own canvases, to grind her own paint, to render figure after figure after figure, and to hone in on composition and structure. Many of her teachers had been students of her father, and much of the academic insight they imparted was rooted in the Boston school. Her teachers endlessly drilled the fundamentals of painting. There was little acknowledgment in her course load of what was happening in New York City and in Europe at the same moment. Minimalism and Conceptual practice were not the fare of the BU curriculum as they were at other more progressive art schools at that time. Moreover, having started college at sixteen, still living at home, and characteristically shy, my mother did not find a close cohort with whom to debate and challenge the limits of what was being offered. Thus, even at its outset, her practice was fairly solitary. Today, it is nearly impossible, with a connected global art world and the onslaught of social media, for any artist to even attempt to isolate, but that was not the case when my mother was starting, and she was relatively content to make her work her way.

This quality ultimately accommodated her dedication to mothering. Though she craved community, she was able to keep her practice alive because she was entirely independent. She has always needed just a few things to make work: time, inspiration, and the elusive element of joy. Painting for her is both an engine for generating a feeling of aliveness and contentment as well as a channel for it. In 2000 and the beginning of 2001, she painted a cycle of works based on the biblical Song of Songs. These paintings, rendered more loosely than most of her work, featured lots of breathing space around her drawings and included lyrics from the psalms such as “my heart has found the one in whom my soul delights”. One cannot imagine words more inflected with gladness. The challenging corollary is that periods of sadness and loss make it much harder to raise her brush to the ready canvases stacked against her studio wall.

My mother’s classical training mandated making the first sketch of a composition in either umber or blue. This is a still an anchor in her approach—and sometimes it is literally the thing that she needs to move past in order to finish a painting. The freshness of her first strokes, the suggestion of what is to come, can feel so satisfying, that it takes tremendous courage to keep going, knowing that she risks losing that early magic. From time to time, she will stop and finish a canvas at this early monochrome stage, applying only the gel medium that she still uses to bring additional luminosity to her paintings. Mostly, though, she soldiers on, grasping onto the possibility that the painting on the other side will be stronger than its origin. It always is.

In the early 1990s, my mother’s studio moved from our basement to a new space purpose-built. It was off of her bedroom, was full of light, held painting racks, had a good sink for cleaning her brushes, and was near the rest of her responsibilities, making getting to the work at hand as easy as possible. It was a place of welcome productivity for many years. She had always wanted to have a space in a proper studio building, but it was impractical with three young children and a husband always on the road. Though my mother does have a large Boston studio now, she makes most of her work in Rockport, Massachusetts, a place that she has been coming to since she was a little girl. She uses the back end of a ramshackle cottage that likely dates back a few hundred years. Despite the low ceilings, uneven plywood floors and lack of proper heating, she favors this studio for its view over her garden; the inner harbor is just beyond, with its perfect viewing of the renowned fishing shack, the Motif #1. This particular perch satisfies her minimal conditions: a vista much improved from the basement of my youth, with decent light, near to her family, with little effort required to arrive. Irrespective of the poor Feng Shui—she paints with her back to a glass-paned door—the studio rims with positive energy. It is a pleasure to come down the stairs from the house to see her at work. In the evenings, with the lights still on, it is possible to view a painting in progress, and she enjoys nothing more than the opportunity to look together at what she has been trying to resolve. She will gather my siblings, her husband Ede, and me to workshop something she is particularly stuck on,and will report back the next day on how things have progressed.

I was in London in 2015 or so, when I first noticed the intimate paintings of flowers by an artist named Jennifer Packer (Figure 3). If my mother’s works are large in scale and varied in chroma, these paintings were the complete opposite: grounded in warm yellows—almost monochromatic—with delicate lines and an elegiac sensibility, yet they were similarly uncompromising of their intent. It was the first time that I could remember seeing paintings of floral bouquets included amongst the gallery exhibitions that I was frequenting. A few years later, in 2018, a well-respected contemporary curator would revisit the possibility of painting flowers (along with still lives and the quotidian surroundings of the domestic) with sincere admiration, reminding viewers that there are many modes in which to be a contemporary painter.

Helen Molesworth’s part monographic exhibition, part curated group show at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art was concerned with artists like Farber whose central actions included absorbing and recording the banal context of everyday life. The show was based on the artist’s lauded essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (Figure 4), which was published in the Winter of 1962-63, in the periodical Film Culture. I had never read the text before visiting the show, and suddenly I had a new way into understanding my mother’s practice. Farber, in his time, had articulated what gets lost when an artist eschews the possibility that the richest subjects and ideas might be explored for just their own sake.

The following Spring, I rounded a corner at the Independent, an art fair in New York City, and was stopped in my tracks by a series of paintings by Emily Sundblad (Figure 5) at Company Gallery. Two of the canvases featured the large, waxy, red, fan-like Anthurium and iconic pink and white Stargazer lilies that my mother so often favors for their architectural qualities. I was gob smacked… here was an artist known for her conceptual practice painting flowers. Though these paintings from 2019 had more narrative titles, like Oyster Eaters, earlier related works from 2014 were called Naturaleza Muerta Viva, or Living Still Lives. I can’t think of a more apt descriptor of my mother’s paintings too.

In the summer of 2020, Karma, a gallery on New York’s Lower East side, hosted a vast group exhibition titled (Nothing but) Flowers (Figure 6). Every wall of the gallery was covered with paintings of flora by fifty-nine artists from Amy Sillman to Manoucher Yektai. In the aftermath of the first wave of the pandemic, the political turmoil, and the ceaseless racial injustices that spring, the gallery chose to present a show dedicated to my mother’s perennial subject. The press release stated: “Symbols and traditions are reconsidered and reinvigorated by the context of our troubled times. And there is perhaps no symbol more enduringly vivacious, beautifully somber, and universally beloved than the ubiquitous, sublime flower.”2

My mother has consistently sought a context for her work, desiring to see where, or if, her work fits in the long arc of art history. Like all makers, she has wanted validation that her work matters. Those who admire her paintings and love her—dedicated collectors and family members alike—frequently reassure her, but she has always intuited some sense that she was out of time. Perhaps that is no longer true. My mother has always had an impulse to make things beautiful and to make beautiful things. She never intended for her paintings, nor her dedication to painting what pleased her, to operate as an act of subtle resistance, and yet staying true to your own voice when it is not popular, can be just that.

Abigail Ross Goodman is a curator of contemporary art. She is based in Cambridge, MA and works across public, private and institutional space.

More about Judi Rotenberg:

Judi Rotenberg: Recent Work — Catalog essay by Martha Oaks, Chief Curator for the Cape Ann Museum for the 2022 exhibition of the same name, held at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, MA.