Robert Riseling Retrospective 1974-2011, A Founders’ Day Exhibition, features paintings from Riseling’s illustrious career as a painter and educator. Riseling joined the faculty of Memphis College of Art in 1974. He taught and directed introductory studio courses and introduced hundreds of young artists to the joy and discipline of the visual arts. Many went on to successful professional careers. He founded the Horn Island excursion, and led each legendary summer adventure to the Gulf of Mexico for more than twenty years. He guided the annual Spring Break trips, exposing students, faculty and friends to destinations that were unique, foreign, and some-times exotic. A primary purpose in each adventure was to present his students and colleagues with landscapes to inspire introspection, reflection, and ultimately great art.

As a professional artist, Riseling has been prolific, showing regularly with works in public and private collections across the nation. Throughout his career, he has travelled extensively as a visiting artist and lecturer.

Although Riseling officially retired from MCA in the Spring of 2011, he can’t keep himself away from the College. He remains a recognizable fixture, still teaching painting and foundation courses, and making travel plans. In recognition of his contributions and long-standing commitment to the College and its students, Riseling was honored with the distinction of Professor Emeritus.

I hope this exhibition brings you as much joy and appreciation for Bob’s talent and accomplishments as it did for me. And on behalf of the College, I extend our collective thanks and appreciation for his many talents and contributions.

Ron JonesPresidentMemphis College of Art

These, in the great traditions of twenti-eth-century painting, are formalist works, driven by Riseling’s richly saturated and at times anti-naturalistic palette and rigorous questioning of forms and space, forms in space, and forms of space. They are often deceptive in this manner, veiling otherwise recognizable imagery within a pared-down, elemental vocabulary of shape and planar zones of color that trouble the laws of per-spectival space that have determined paint-ings for the past half-millenium. We are thus called upon to look longer, in search of what the works wish to reveal and what we might elicit from them.

Riseling’s paintings are richly embedded with a multi-tiered history, as much a per-sonal narrative as an observer’s retelling of the history of modern painting. Some of the earliest and most representational works take their inspiration from cemeter-ies in Taos and Santa Fe. Their warbling line work is as much a response to the grave markers as the shifting light of the arid New Mexican landscape. This naturalistic im-pulse is offset by the electric hues that out-line these forms, moving these works past the quiet, meditative precedent of Georgia O’Keefe towards something more visionistic,

more contemporary. They are simultane-ously weighted by the quiet of death and energized by the living, ambling movement of the artist’s hand.

In the aftermath of these, we are able to see a broadening of both subject matter and treatment. More absorption, more experimentation. These middle-period works are also the product of travel, pri-marily to and from Memphis. There are the storefront windows, the record of a downtown abandoned and left to fend for itself. Riseling’s paintings of these windows are neither vacant nor forlorn but instead, as always, animated by geometry and color. Again and again we see the odd overlap-ping of windows and façade, some open at a diagonal, others intersected by paths of light. Their merger of form and color recall Clyfford Still and Ellsworth Kelly; the way in which this pairing creates a flattened, active pictorial field that leaves the eye wanting for a place to settle recalls the urban ballet one finds in Mondrian’s last works.

These urban landscapes find their echo in Riseling’s depictions of the natural world. Among the most sacred, and persistent, motifs in this career is Mississippi’s Horn

In 1865, after having visited the Prado in Madrid, Edouard Manetdescribed Diego Velazquez as a “painter’s painter.” This ultimatecompliment—and Manet’s esteem for Velazquez is visible throughout his career—speaks to the alchemical magic of painting, the formulas for which have been a closely guarded secret throughout history, avail-able only to the select few who are able to see through the illusions of pictorial vision. There have been others. Titian, Rembrandt, Manet himself, and Cézanne come to mind first, those chosen few who have pivoted the history of painting away from its history, toward the new and uncharted.

This idea of the “painter’s painter” has distracted us from another kind of painter, whose art speaks not to their brethren alone, but to us all. Rarely, if ever, have we discussed the “viewer’s painter,” that artist who is able to raise the viewer’s awareness of not only this painting, but, through it, of all painting. Bob Riseling is this kind of a painter, a painter who allows his viewers to see variously and simultaneously, backwards through the history of painting into a present that is en-tirely his own and a future that cannot be seen except through this same history.

Robert Riseling Viewer’s Painter

There Was A Pink CloudOn Horn Island

Mixed Media 1992

Green Mountain/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Island, an annual point of arrival for over a quarter century. These works lay bare one of the great paradoxes of painting, the impossible dilemma of representing depth on a flat surface. Zones of color that spread flatly upon the canvas denote shadows cast upon a beach, piles of driftwood swept in by the tide, and the native flora scattered across the island. They are a forceful assertion that, despite their perceived abstraction, Riseling’s works are firmly tethered to the naturalistic traditions of landscape painting. This oscillation between flatness and depth, representation and abstraction, continues in his most recent work. These paintings, conceived in Vermont, extend this ongoing fascination with the landscape, searching for new ways to enunciate these essential questions of painting without sacrificing any continuity of vocabulary or syntax. New locations cause old questions to yield new answers.

As has been the case throughout this career, these newest paintings rejoice in their own mak-ing. Observation and study are inflected through composition and color and the viewer is again called upon to extract from the works the whispers of place and space. Newly radiant pinks col-lide with the muted greens and blues of the Vermont countryside, reminding us that paintings of nature are anything but nature.

This is gymnastic looking, wherein one is catapulted out of the usual expectations and offerings of the landscape genre into a space entirely different, equally traditional and new, suspended amidst the innovations of this most challenging last century of painting. They give of the same history from which they take and cause us to see that history anew.

Looking at Riseling’s works can be all about surface and formalism, but they are always about much more, about seeing differently, in different places, with different results. These are paintings that reward the engaged, active viewer. This is the work of a viewer’s painter. And that is the greatest compliment that can be paid.

Adrian R. DuranAssistant ProfessorArea Head, Art History

Beale Street Landing WindowsMixed MediaTriptych 1982

Window/PatioMixed Media 1997

Taos CrossAcrylic on Canvas 1998Collection of Veda Reed

Windows/FansAcrylic on Canvas

Triptych 1990

Composanto De La Trinidad/FernandezAcrylic on Canvas 1999

Beach Log #1Acrylic on Canvas 2007

Beach Log #2Acrylic on Canvas 2007

Monument/RedAcrylic on Canvas 2003

Monument/BlueAcrylic on Canvas 2003

Silver Rosemary/After KatrinaAcrylic on Canvas 2006

Monument FamilyAcrylic on Canvas 2007

Pink Clouds Over Green Mountains/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Pattern/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Road To Johnson/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Blue Tree/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Rust Hall Exhibition ListJanuary 3-29, 2012

E-WallAcrylic on CanvasTriptych 1981

Beale Street Landing WindowsMixed MediaTriptych 1982

Gold WindowSerigraph 1983

Memphis WindowSerigraph 1983

387 South Main #2Acrylic on Canvas 1984

387 South Main #1Serigraph 1984

387 South Main #2Serigraph 1984

South Front StreetAcrylic on Canvas 1986

Rosemary ShadowAcrylic & Ink on Paper 1987Collection of Marc Riseling

Composanto De La Trinidad #3Acrylic & Ink on Paper 1987Collection of Marc Riseling

Windows/FansAcrylic on CanvasTriptych 1990

Horn Island WhiteAcrylic on Canvas 1990

Horn Island GoldAcrylic on Canvas 1990

Horn Island NightAcrylic on Canvas 1990

There Was A Pink CloudOn Horn IslandMixed Media 1992

South Main Facade #4Mixed Media 1996

South Main Facade #6Mixed Media 1996

Window/PatioMixed Media 1997

White RosemaryAcrylic on Canvas 1998

Taos CrossAcrylic on Canvas 1998Collection of Veda Reed

Composanto De La Trinidad/FloresAcrylic on Canvas 1999

Composanto De La Trinidad/FernandezAcrylic on Canvas 1999

South Main Facade #4Acrylic & Wood on Canvas 2002

South Main Facade #6Acrylic & Wood on Canvas 2002

Creature From Garden PondAcrylic on Wood, Glass Eyes 2002

Monument/RedAcrylic on Canvas 2003

Monument/BlueAcrylic on Canvas 2003

White RosemarySerigraph 2005

Silver Rosemary/After KatrinaAcrylic on Canvas 2006

Barge #1, Barge #2Acrylic on CanvasDiptych 2007

Monument Dan, Monument VickiAcrylic on CanvasDiptych 2007

Beach Log #1Acrylic on Canvas 2007

Beach Log #2Acrylic on Canvas 2007

Monument FamilyAcrylic on Canvas 2007

Monument FriendsAcrylic on Canvas 2007Collection of Bill Price

Monument DawnAcrylic on Canvas 2007

Monument #2Acrylic on Canvas 2007

Road To Johnson/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Red Tree/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Pink Cloud/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Pink Clouds Over GreenMountains/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Blue Tree/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Green Mountain/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Yellow/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Black Storm Cloud/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011

Pattern/VermontAcrylic on Canvas 2011