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Anne Rothenstein

Echoes of Solitude

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Anne Rothenstein’s artistry captivates viewers with its distinctive exploration of solitude, memory, and the interplay between figures and their environments. Her paintings, often characterized by their haunting and introspective qualities, delve into themes of isolation, personal space, and the passage of time. Rothenstein’s recent shift towards landscapes, influenced by the stark solitude of the pandemic, adds a new dimension to her work, highlighting her ability to transform personal experiences into universally resonant imagery. Through her unique approach, she invites us into a world where ambiguity reigns, encouraging a deep, introspective connection with her art.

PLUS MAGAZINE: Anne, what inspired your unique approach to portraying figures, interior spaces, and landscapes?

ANNE ROTHENSTEIN: I have been painting for many years, and after so long, it’s quite hard to know how I arrived at the places my paintings take me. I’ve always painted figures in rooms, sitting, alone, frequently on beds, and as a painter, I am most often alone, in a room, entirely comfortable with solitude, with a propensity for darkness and for turning my back to the world, so I suppose these interiors with figures are the nearest I come to obviously autobiographical paintings. I used to paint tiny landscapes, not really landscapes at all, as they were mostly populated by houses. But then came the pandemic, which threw so much off balance, arriving as an alarming bomb in all our lives. For many years, I had a house in Dorset and divided my time between London and the country. I had to sell the house a couple of years prior to Covid, and the whole business of being shut in for weeks, alone, in this suddenly silent city began to feel uncomfortably unnatural. Something I had never experienced before. I began to dream of open spaces, of fields, of the sea, of expansive skies. And I began painting landscapes.

P: In your painting Three Figures (2023), you explore themes of isolation within a social context. How do you convey this message through the ambiguity of your figures and your references to fashion?

AR: I seem to find it hard to get my people to communicate or relate to each other when I occasionally get around to painting multiple figures, three is unique, I think.
In an earlier version of the painting, the figures were much closer, almost as if jostling in a crowd, and then, almost without my realizing it, they began separating, turning away from each other, and retreating into their own thoughts and spaces.
Dressing figures is interesting (my figures are often bare) as it allows me to play with color and texture. I’m not interested in fashion as such. but am interested in style and find androgyny an almost perfect way to look. A man’s hands with varnished nails, a boy’s haircut on a woman. I have no idea of the gender of many of my figures. It doesn’t matter to me. Ambiguity and mystery are far more important. People, seemingly lost in thought, quietly inhabiting their own worlds, automatically become mysterious. On a much deeper level, I have feelings about human beings’ inherent isolation, which is far too broad a subject to discuss here.

P: Could you share more about your process of incorporating memory and found material from newspapers and magazines into your paintings? How does this contribute to the mysterious quality of your work?

AR: I find almost everything about my painting process mysterious. An image will catch my attention, a photo in a magazine, another painting, a glimpse through a window, a tree I might snap on my phone, and I often think that from then on, the whole pursuit in making the work is to try and discover why that image caught my attention.
Sometimes, it opens up a memory, sometimes it highlights feelings about what is going on in the world, but I only discover quite late what it is revealing, and sometimes, I never find out. It’s like exploring and peeling away layers, and along the way, the subject takes on a life of its’ own. It’s rare for the final work to be recognizable from the original image. Perhaps this mysterious process bleeds into the work itself.

P: Simon Grant describes the experience of viewing your paintings as joining a drama unfolding. How do you create this effect and engage viewers in narratives within your artworks?

AR: Engaging the viewer is, of course, everything one wants, though I’m not sure you can do it deliberately. However, I think I leave much space for the viewer to enter the arena. I have talked about continuing to work on a painting ( often over many months ) until I feel something is happening. There is always some sort of narrative taking place, although I’m not always sure what it is; maybe this leaves an opening for people to engage. The viewer so often sees something I don’t. I love that we all see and interpret paintings very differently.

P: Your use of color, including burgundy red tones, pale greens, and nostalgic blues, is notable in your work. How do you use color to evoke depth and movement in your paintings?

AR: I have a very complicated relationship with color. Color can give me goosebumps, and very bright colors can hurt my eyes and make me feel a little queasy. I spend time taking any harshness out of color with various mixing strategies. ‘ Nostalgic blues ‘, I like that, sounds like music. I mute my colors. And the layering of color is important for me, glimpsing one color through another, that depth. I love an ancient door that has been painted over many times. But this is all instinctive stuff, I couldn’t tell you what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I have no knowledge of the theory of color. But it’s what I spend the most time trying to get right.

P: In Shadow and Heat (2023), you present two versions of the same composition, suggesting distorted memories resurfacing. Could you elaborate on how you capture the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of memory in these works?

AR: Shadow was the first painting I’d ever done on canvas. I was interested in this new surface, so I made the painting fast and left it in a much looser state than usual, enjoying that immediacy. I then started the second, on wood, to try to get a feel for and understand the difference between these surfaces.
This second version took a long time, and as I painted, news began to filter through about heatwaves and fires raging around the world in what turned out to be one of the hottest years on record. London was hot, and I worked at home at the top of my house, and my studio was very hot, and ‘ Heat ‘ became the subject of the painting.
I love making two versions of what started off as almost identical paintings and seeing the different directions they take. I love seeing both the remembered image and how it veers off and makes its own way.

P: Your works show influences from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century portraiture artists like Edouard Vuillard and Edvard Munch. How do you reinterpret these influences while addressing contemporary issues such as gender politics and environmental concerns?

AR: Painters can’t help but have many past artists in their blood. They are in our DNA. I don’t go very far back in time and I take from many sources; contemporary artists and those outside the mainstream are also a huge influence on my work.
The challenge, of course, is not just to reinterpret but to reinvent, to be alert to the peculiarities of your own vision and run with it, play with it. Nobody else sees the world as I see it; that’s what we’re responding to when we look at Vuillard or Munch or Rose Wylie or Tal R. I’m fascinated, appalled, and entranced by so much of what I see around me; my work can’t help but be affected by it. And even when it comes to memory, that memory is being revisited now. Today is all we have; it has to be the most interesting place in which we find ourselves, particularly for an artist, and it should always be a reinvention of yesterday, or else we are simply left with repetition, the death knell for art.