On March 3, at age 87,Laurence Rathsack died of natural causes. He departed as he lived, quietly, with little hoopla and modest headlines. Yet he left a huge legacy.
Rathsack was an explorer of sorts, an artistic experimenter who wanted viewers to see beyond “that tyranny” of camera-created reality, as he once put it, who sought to portray physical objects “as though one were seeing them in a totally new way.”
To achieve this ambitious goal, Rathsack chose the medium of the Sunday painter – watercolors. Yet he rejected the typically fluid or improvised feel of that medium and worked more like an old master, applying layer after layer of the thinnest washes to get the subtlest color nuances. His method was painstaking, with up to 50 layers of paint applied, in a purist’s search for the ineffable.
He created a world with the deftest strokes, turning huge mechanical things like aFreighter (1959) into something soulful and barely solid. In Train in Steam (1956), a key transitional work, the locomotive is barely there, all but dissolving into snowy smoke and steam.
One of the top Wisconsin painters of the last half-century, Rathsack was also among its finest art professors. He taught art at UW-Milwaukee (and its predecessor, the University of Wisconsin Extension), from 1954 until 1988, and then part-time until 1997. He taught an estimated 20,000 students and had a huge impact on generations of artists, art teachers and art lovers.
“Rathsack has an exceptional pedagogic talent,” wrote Liz Bachhuber, his student who became an artist and art professor at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. “Rathsack … taught me to look thoroughly and grasp the essential.”
And he wasn’t just there for advanced students. Rathsack once called beginning drawing the most difficult and critical course “to open the student to the wonders of free seeing.”
The professor, in turn, learned from this process. Teaching, he said, “further forced me into a lifelong search into the mysteries of how we see.”
Rathsack didn’t make it easy on himself. He was a model for students of dedication to art, taking unpaid leaves to work on his painting. He was a perfectionist who might take months and even years to create one work. He restricted his palette, often to just ivory and lamp black, using watercolors like a minimalist to create starkly powerful paintings. In Trees and Light (1965), reproduced above, “the boundaries between sky, earth and water are obliterated; the shore landscape dissolves into light reflections,” as German curator Gerda Wendermann has written.
Rathsack’s was a spiritual quest, one conducted in nearly seven decades of painting and more than four of teaching, to capture the evanescent mystery of life. In the course of that search, he helped all of us to see.
