{"id":1384,"date":"2012-05-14T11:32:27","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T11:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1384"},"modified":"2012-05-15T14:40:36","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T14:40:36","slug":"the-rush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1384","title":{"rendered":"The Rush heads home"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Rush Whitacre<\/p><\/div>\n

Next week, I\u2019m going to visit Brooklyn one more time to help Rush Whitacre load up his pickup and head back to his home and studio in Ohio. He\u2019s had his fill of New York City. I\u2019ve gotten to know Rush well since we met last summer. He offered the use of his truck to Viridian Artists, where I show my work, when the gallery moved to its new location on 28th<\/sup> St. in Chelsea. He had me laughing that first day, and he\u2019s kept me laughing every time we\u2019ve met since then. I\u2019ve described him before: tall, massive, with blondish-brown hair and a cropped beard. He wouldn\u2019t have looked out of place sitting next to Joe Namath in a lounge somewhere back in the 70s. Yet Rush doesn\u2019t pretend to convey that kind of cool: he\u2019s a guileless hugger, who brings out the nicest qualities in the other people around him, always trying to make someone else a little happier while he\u2019s around. (Often, this involves the consumption of beer, though not always.) In a way, his entire approach to life is anti-Cool. He\u2019s extremely intelligent, and yet he doesn\u2019t impose any of it on anyone else. Just before his move to Brooklyn, he finished his Ph.D. in fine arts at the University of Cincinnati and, as I\u2019ve pointed out before, he has a total of five college degrees, including ones in biology and bio-chem. He\u2019d rather come across as the happy, enthusiastic midwestern country boy who listens to Taylor Swift and paints huge sunflowers without a whiff of postmodern irony.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m disappointed that Rush is leaving, but I don\u2019t think he came to the city in order to break into the art scene. He seemed to be using his year to absorb as much art as he could and return with a large inventory of memories and photographs for teaching back in Ohio. On my last visit I let him use my Nikon D40, and we plowed through most of the galleries at the Metropolitan, where he shot nearly 300 images for use as teaching aids if he gets the job he hopes he\u2019ll land for the fall back home. He has allowed me to crash at his place in Brooklyn when I come visit the city, and his fellow tenants tolerated me\u2014I can be a bull in a china shop, in the way I lumber around and in the way I express my views. The arrangement worked well in two respects: I\u2019ve saved money on hotels, but in the late-night\/early morning conversations I\u2019ve learned a lot about these younger artists just out of school, and it\u2019s been humbling. The energy and purpose they invest in their work puts my own efforts, when I was their age, into humbling perspective. I\u2019ve learned a lot about my own motivations as an artist, in defending my reactions to art with them, and I\u2019ve gotten closer to what I value most in art. Yet in my observations of how Rush and Lauren Purje, his fellow tenant, create art, I\u2019ve really enlarged my definition of good art. They\u2019ve been teaching me in the way they do their work and in what they\u2019ve told me about it. It\u2019s a continuing education, and really I have Rush to thank for that. He welcomed me into his life and his apartment, for as long as I wanted, whenever I was in the city.<\/p>\n

Rush is incredibly ambitious. He has amazing creative reserves. He has been writing poems, letters, and a fantasy novel, on his cell phone\u2014sending them to himself and copying me in on them\u2014during his breaks and his slow periods as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum. Without the outlet of that writing, I\u2019m not sure he could have maintained his composure: his task at the Metropolitan has mostly been to say two things. Don\u2019t touch. <\/em>And, the ever-popular, often-requested:The toilet is around that corner, to the right.<\/em> He joked about how he doesn\u2019t take any of his writing, other than his novels, all that seriously, but his work has improved over the past year. The size of his keypad, compared to the size of his thumbs, means you have to wade through a sea of typos in order to grasp what he\u2019s saying, but it\u2019s often rewarding. Some of his poems\u2014minus a couple words and a couple lines\u2014are solid, and these little gems pop up among a stream of five or six poems all written in a single day. He laughs at how little I write, the guy who\u2019s a professional at this, and I fire back names like Salinger and Harper Lee, in self-defense, and say \u201cit\u2019s a matter of quality or quantity, buddy.\u201d But I know that\u2019s a dodge. He\u2019s putting in his ten thousand hours of apprenticeship early, as a writer and<\/em> a painter, and it\u2019ll be something to keep an eye on when he really hits his stride.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Rush found the city too confining and too crowded. He needs more green in his life and way more space. But I think, most of all, the apartment he has been sharing made it impossible for him to work on the large scale he loves. He has an enormous space on his family\u2019s land in Ohio. Maybe he\u2019ll get back to paintings that require the ladder on wheels he built to paint some of his earlier work. He may also return to his installations, where his skills in construction have enabled him to \u201csculpt\u201d room-size interpretations of the physical world: an ocean wave made out of desks and chairs is one of my favorites. I know our friendship and correspondence will continue, because I want to write more about Rush and what happens as a result of this move back home, but also because I need more exposure to his heedless confidence in his own creative energy. He gets an idea and simply executes it without second-guessing himself, without hesitating or doubting\u2014just gets it done and immediately moves on to the next project. I tend to noodle over something until I\u2019ve worked it to death. For months he sent me installments of a fantasy novel, which was a kind of poetic and nightmarish interpretation of his tenure in New York City, and on the day after he sent me the final page, he emailed the first chapter of a new novel about his experiences as an art student at Ohio University. He didn\u2019t even give himself a day off between books.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next week, I\u2019m going to visit Brooklyn one more time to help Rush Whitacre load up his pickup and head back to his home and studio in Ohio. He\u2019s had his fill of New York City. I\u2019ve gotten to know Rush well since we met last summer. He offered the use of his truck to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Rush heads home - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1384\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Rush heads home - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Next week, I\u2019m going to visit Brooklyn one more time to help Rush Whitacre load up his pickup and head back to his home and studio in Ohio. 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