An Interview With Adrianne Rubenstein

For our third edition of products we have collaborated with New York artist Adrianne Rubenstein. Her work often depicts everyday objects, motifs from the natural world and her memories from childhood. We sat down with Adrianne on a warm Thursday afternoon to discuss her process, motherhood and creative magic.

Q: Can you tell us about your inspirations?

I think what I’m mining for my paintings is stuff I have always been looking at. What have I always been surrounded by? What are the motifs that make up my visual sense memory? And what occupied the spaces that I was formed in?

I’m very influenced by women from the generation just before me. Artists like Karen Kilimnik and Laura Owens. They very specifically went to textile imagery and women’s art imagery and then remade it as Contemporary Art. When I saw them doing that I wanted to carry that tradition, which they were also carrying from those before them.

Faith Ringgold was such a huge landmark artist for me and my development – she’s an African-American artist who passed away at a really old age this past year and she made quilts that had kind of autobiographical tableaux in them. Often when I was learning art history and painting in school it was such a male-dominated conversation. Ringgold’s work came out of her life, her activism, her liveliness as a real mother and community member. It gave me a way to recenter myself and recenter my perspective, on the other influences that I wanted to find for myself in the world.

Q: How would you describe your studio practise?

It’s so goofy and so free, it’s sort of like when you become a young adult for the first time and you’re not accountable to anybody.

Just being in the studio, is still working. I’m processing what I’m doing and there’s part-time where you’re physically painting and also very crucially, times where you have to turn that off in your brain and not think about it. Otherwise language doesn’t have room to breathe. I have to completely forget what I’m doing and come back fresh over and over and over again. I apply new decision making and new ideas and hopefully surprise myself, it’s free and unstructured and surprising.

“You have to get back to a sort of childlike wonder and inventiveness”   

Q: Have you always felt this sense of freedom?

I cannot believe that every day I had the confidence to come back again the next day because it seems so intangible, I don’t know how I kept believing in myself. At the time it felt like my life depended on it, to keep coming back. I knew that I had to try to make something and I knew that the only way to make it was this ‘magic thing’ … you go to your studio and then something happens there, and you keep building and building on it, forever…

When I’m in my studio I have so many positive and fantastic emotions and feelings about the freedom and the achievement and the process and it just feels wonderful to get to see my ideas.

Q: Do you paint from real life or photographs?

I paint entirely from imagination and most of it is spontaneous. A lot of it is reacting to the painting itself. I do an iteration of the painting and then go back into it as if it’s blank, as if it’s a coloring book page and I’ll reimagine the image again. I’ll reconstitute the elements in it and I keep doing that and it seems the way that the image builds mimics my psychology and my thought forms.

I’m of the camp that thinks you have to totally forget yourself and forget everything to make the best possible painting. Get back to a sort of childlike wonder and inventiveness, almost like you’re from another planet and you’re seeing everything for the first time.

Q: What excited you about working with Austin Austin?

I absolutely love the concept of home goods, things for daily use and intimate spaces. I love to see the transformation and the interplay between studio art that is utterly expansive and the specificity of a product.

The image of the artwork itself has its own currency, the reproducible image, it’s its own thing, it’s such a deep concept for me. It’s like this science fiction, it’s kind of a mind expanding concept but it’s absolutely infinitely transmutable. It’s this idea that the art is gonna go places that I would never even think of. Attaching the image to a concrete item, something gentle on the planet, it feels positive, generous community building. It seems like this infinite Hall of Mirrors to other minded people.

“The image of the artwork on products means the art is going to places that I would never even think of, it seems like this infinite Hall of Mirrors to other minded people” 

Q: Tell us about the painting ‘The Parting of the Green Sea’, featured on the Rosemary balm.

This is a romanticised, impressionistic description of that little green piece of paper that they put between sushi, shaped like grass. It imitates nature and is obviously very niche to packaging. 

It’s almost as though this tiny painting makes itself into your food garbage. The beauty of these design elements that are so lowly, almost invisible. They are inserted into spaces in your life where you would never think to look for a sign or language, but in fact, they have a tremendous amount of language and meaning.

Q: Tell us about the painting ‘Magic Hand’  featured on the Cedar & Patchouli Hand Cream.

The hand cream features the artwork Magic Hand by Rubenstein, which references shadow puppets and how the eye and the mind can be tricked in a diaphanous kind of awareness. 

The painting also nods to the idea of paint as a metaphor for things disappearing and appearing. Paint can cover up or reveal something. I see painting as a door opening to an entire world. I just want to peek through that door that painters create, forever. I’m totally fascinated and enamored with it.