Editor's pick Art retrospective

Artist’s journey

Saturday, July 2 to Monday, July 31, Thursdays through Mondays from 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Artist’s reception Saturday, July 2, 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The Blue Victorian, Jeffersonville, NY. Free. 845/482-5544

Seventeen years ago Allan Rubin moved from his birthplace in New York City to Cochecton, NY, where he has ever since been plying his art, creating paintings, sculpture, and hybrids between the two. His exodus from a man-made to a natural environment is only one of the evolutions that is reflected in his upcoming exhibition at The Blue Victorian, “Then to Now, There to Here, That to This: A Retrospective,” which shows, in four rooms, artwork from four different decades of the artist’s life.

In Rubin’s 1969 “House on the Moon,” a piece rendered with the trompe d’oeil precision of surrealism, nature appears sterile and detached, literally a lunar landscape. It doesn’t appear at all in the bird’s-eye cityscape of the 1985 “Exchange Place,” although life here has seeped into the work in the form of the vibrating, saturated colors that run as a thread through the latter decades of Rubin’s work.

By the 1990s, however, quirky organic forms erupted into Rubin’s opus, as reflected in 1995’s “Stalker,” an abstract yet insistently insectile form created, perhaps not coincidentally, after Rubin’s move to the country. In the most recent metamorphosis, Rubin’s structures appear almost to have evolved into unique life forms, part plant, part insect, part human. In the whimsical and disturbing “Family,” created in 2005, fragments of human faces peer out warily from a twig-like frame, apparently unaware that they are connected by it into a single chimerical beast.

Referring to his parents’ and teachers’ reservations when he finished school, Rubin says, “They all threw up their hands and exclaimed, ‘do what you want to do.’ I gamely took this as tacit encouragement to steer an unpopular course and pursue a unique and personal vision. I have made radical turns along the way but I believe I have not wavered from that plan. This limited retrospective contains examples of many directions I have taken in my artwork, and is for me a grand opportunity to examine my creative continuity somewhere in the middle of a lifetime of making art.”

By presenting the works in a way that lets us follow the artist’s journey, the show exhibits that creative continuity to the viewers as well, enabling insights that would not have been possible from viewing them in isolation, and providing an unusually complete artistic experience.