What Are You Working On Now? Rebecca Pugh

Rebecca Pugh, Installation view, 2023.

What are you working on now? is a Couch in the Desert series where we ask artists what they are making and thinking about in and outside the studio.

Rebecca Pugh

Patterns that I observe in the landscape drives my use of abstraction. Rather than specific sites, I reference ideas from my surroundings, most recently inspired by an abundance of fences intersecting the landscape. I moved to Texas at the beginning of the pandemic to teach at Texas A&M University, in College Station, which is a college town in the center of a triangle of the state’s major cities: Houston, Austin, and Dallas. In other words, there is a lot of driving involved with living in Texas.

One thing I loved about driving through the Mojave Desert was how the power lines and vertical poles follow the highways. Driving through the outskirts of Texas has a similar repetition of line and shape – in fences that pass by. I’m drawn to the repetition of vertical posts and shapes between horizontal rails. For example, the tight horizontal lines of twisted steel of a of barbed wire fence visually section and frame the grass within a grid.

Rebecca Pugh. Untitled. Digital photograph. 2023.

From my apartment window, I see layers of parallel fences that recede into the distance. I live at the furthest edge of the city and the perimeter of my apartment community is surrounded by a horse pasture on one side and cattle ranch on another. There is an interesting set of two parallel fences directly across from my apartment: one old and one new, installed just inches apart. The newer iron fence is painted blue and has rigid vertical columns, which contrasts the older (original) wooden fence behind it with horizontal rows of barbed wire. I love that in some areas of the old fence, the barbed wire slumps with gravity and twists into other rows. I was thinking about the barbed wire fence that frames the landscape when I created my painting titled, Boundaries.

Rebecca Pugh. Boundaries. Acrylic paint, graphite, paper on wooden panel. 40 x 30 inches. 2023

A few months later, while driving home (south) from Canada I saw Georgia O’Keefe’s painting “From the Lake No. 1” from 1924 at Des Moines Art Center. I’ve admired her work for a long time, but this painting resonates with me because of the horizontal sense of push and pull of shape and color, and the vertical format. I interpret the repetition of color in her work as land and sky reflecting on a lake. After spending the summer at the lake where I grew up, her abstract painting of a lake was striking to see.

Georgia O'Keeffe. From the Lake No. 1, 1924. Oil on canvas. Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, 1984.3. Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines. Public domain.

I often prefer vertical formats for my landscape work. As a graduate student at UNLV, I explored abstract spaces in the Mojave Desert and referenced geological strata in my work with the tension of torn fabric and canvas stapled to freestanding wooden structures that stood vertically in the gallery. Shapes in between fences remind me of the negative space in between the ripped fabric in my freestanding work.

Rebecca Pugh. PARALLELS (solo exhibition). Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, UNLV. 2015.

I am continuing to focus on expanding my approach to painting; I enjoy the process of finding harmony among different materials. In my earlier work, I used paper-like materials such as bed linens and polyethylene sheets (plastic tablecloths and shopping bags). Currently, I am incorporating cut shapes of paper into my paintings on wooden panel. I cut and mount shapes of graphite mark-making on paper to reference the rhythm and repetition of line in long grass.

Rebecca Pugh. Grass (film still). 2023

I teach courses in color theory, drawing, and two-dimensional design at Texas A&M University, which influences my work in the studio. In color theory, I teach students about color using Albert Munsell’s color space. Recently, I’m using acrylic paint that is specially formulated to match Munsell’s neutral grays; I like the balance that achromatic gray provides to the graphite and painted colors in my work. To me, using gray on my two-dimensional work is like incorporating the physical shadows cast on the floor and walls in my freestanding work.

Rebecca Pugh. Fence Posts (Texas). Acrylic paint, graphite, paper on wooden panel. 36 x 72 inches. 2023.

I often think about Bauhaus artists, Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, who were both art educators and wrote about color. Itten illustrated his book, The Elements of Color, with checkerboard grid designs and in his section about the seven color contrasts, he writes that using black and white as accents influences the contrast of adjacent hues. Similarly, in Josef Alber’s text, Interaction of Color, he writes that “color is the most relative medium in art,” since colors appear differently when placed beside each other due to simultaneous contrast. Much in the same way that colors can be made to appear differently, incorporating different materials into a painting is a relative process that affects color.

My tech-savvy students have inspired me to use digital tools in my preliminary process. In the past, I would plan my work with graphite, colored pencils, and collage of colored paper. More recently, my process begins with a drawing on paper that leads to using digital tools to plan my use of color. Drawing and painting digitally allows me to work through different design possibilities quickly.

Rebecca Pugh, digital preliminary work. 2023.

I was recently inspired by a quote in the New Yorker from Minimalist artist Anne Truitt, who is best known for her minimalist sculptures fabricated from wood and painted with layers of acrylic paint. Truitt wrote in her Daybook journal that “artists have no choice but to express their lives.” Since her work is very abstract, I was surprised to learn about the autobiographical context of her work. To me, it is interesting to think of art like records of experiences from an artist’s life; I love how meaning can be expressed through abstraction without presenting narrative or imagery.

Rebecca Pugh is an artist, educator, and curator. Originally from Canada, she has lived in the U.S. for the past decade and graduated with her MFA in Studio Art from UNLV. Notable past shows in Nevada include solo exhibitions such as “Perimeters” at Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery and the travelling exhibition “Basin & Range” presented by Nevada Arts Council. Her work has been recently featured in national juried exhibitions including “Transcending the West” in Colorado and “2023 Texas National” juried by William Underwood Eiland, Director of Georgia Museum of Art. Currently, she is an Instructional Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in the School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts (PVFA) sharing her time teaching art courses and serving as the curator of Wright Gallery.

See more of Rebecca’s work on her website, on Instagram, and on Facebook.

All images courtesy of the artist.

Posted and published by Ellie Rush on December 4, 2023.