Reuben Gordon

Reuben Gordon was born and raised in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City in a family of artists. 

From an early age, he was exposed to the language of painting, developing a deep understanding of the visual qualities of abstraction. 

The landscape of the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Brooklyn, and the fun loving people he grew up with there, formed his internal architecture. As does the special kind of melancholy that exists in the desire for a colorful life.

The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

Abraham Cahan, the Belarussian-born Jewish immigrant writer, said, “We will accomplish in the new world one-hundred times more than we could in the old. But you’ll not be able to erase the old home from your heart. The heart will be drawn elsewhere. And in your solitude, images will rise up and stare in your faces”.

Hemingway, remarking on Miro’s masterpiece, The Farm, wrote, “It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.“

The deep human tendency to imagine places and people we love but cannot return to feeds the act of painting, where you are trying to expel a nameless energy onto a canvas, in longing. You hope your expressions relate to the universal, though they come from an individual in solitude.

The longing, exteriorizing the unconscious, results in an anxious explosion of beauty that is objective and plastic. I am most interested in color, and formal qualities of painting. Concepts, emotions and meanings follow, through them.

Reuben Gordon