Rackstraw Downes (born 1939) is a British-born realist painter and author. His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, depictions of industry and the environment, and elongated compositions with complex perspective.[1]
Though he is primarily based in New York City, where he has painted numerous cityscapes and urban scenes such as his series of four paintings, entitled "Four Spots Along a Razor-Wire Fence",[4] Downes has traveled widely, creating a significant number of landscape paintings on site in Maine and Texas, of subjects including the harbor of Portland, Maine and the Donald Judd structures in Marfa, Texas. He has also painted interiors of a panoramic scale similar to his landscapes.[5] Downes' paintings are characterized by their vastness of scope as much as their attention to detail: "they are composed of a fused sequence of visual observations, their horizontal lines 'bending' so as to acknowledge the Earth's curvature and the limitations of two-point perspective when applied to wide-angle views."[6]
He has written for The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, The New Criterion, and other publications. He also edited Art In Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935–1975, a collection of Fairfield Porter's writing. Downes' own writing has been published in two small paperbacks: In Relation to the Whole, which features three essays; Under The Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal, a documentation of his painting process; and in his own monograph, Rackstraw Downes.
Schwartz, Sanford; Storr, Robert, and Downes, Rackstraw. Rackstraw Downes. Princeton University Press, April 2005
Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal: The making of two paintings. 5.9.99 - 11.15.99. New York, Turning the Head Press, 2000
In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays from Three Decades - 1973, 1981, 1996. New York, Edgewise Press, 2000
References
^"He like jam-ups of culture and nature, where practical human uses overlap with indifferent geology and shaggy flora--he is the bard of weeds." Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, quoted by Schwartz, Sanford; Storr, Robert, and Downes, Rackstraw. Rackstraw Downes. Princeton University Press, April 2005.