Ruth Pastine

Ruth Pastine is an American artist known for abstract minimalist paintings that explore the phenomenological experience of color, light and space. Critics relate her art to the Southern California Light and Space movement, while identifying key differences, such as its focus on metaphysical aspects of consciousness and its reliance on basic, traditional means rather than synthetic-industrial materials. In these regards, writers trace her artistic lineage to Monet and Malevich—who sought to capture light's ineffability—and to Abstract Expressionist and Color field painters such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, who probed the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint. Pastine's paintings typically consist of seamless gradating bands or fields of color built in layers with countless brushstrokes, which optically coalesce and appear to pulse, float, dissolve, or glow as if backlit. Peter Frank has written that she "paints as purely optical a kind of painting as it is possible to paint … nothing but color and its presentation, with myriad, closely shifted color modulations."