Reuben Gordon was born and raised in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. With both parents being abstract painters, Gordon has been surrounded by paintings, even before he possessed language, which gave him a deep understanding of the visual.
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.
In 2018, Reuben Gordon moved to Los Angeles. Since, Gordon developed an appreciation for the unique nature of California, and for road trips, both of which became a theme in his work.
However, despite being apart from it, New York City remains central to the artist work.
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
