Lydio Rubio maps the infinite at Butterfield Library
For a few minutes, the artist Lydia Rubio held a small crowd at the Butterfield library in Cold Spring spellbound as she explained the inspirations and frames of reference she drew upon to create Cosmos, Dystopia, Utopia, a book of paintings and sketches on handmade paper. The piece is part of an exhibit of her work, Empowering Narratives, that continues at the library through April 15.
The book is protected by a thick sheet of plastic, so Rubio made a video to show it off (below). As pages turned on screen, Rubio namechecked the 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, blues singer Dinah Washington, the sacred geometry of a triangle standing in as a representation of Christ, what happens when finite tools are used to map the infinite and the cellist Julia Kent, who wandered into Rubio’s studio in Hudson because she admired her work. Kent ended up composing the video’s haunting score.
“Is your brain like this in everything you do?” an onlooker asked. Rubio responded: “I like to think of art as a mechanism of the imagination.”
Rubio’s work has been making unlikely connections for decades: art and architecture, South America and the Hudson Valley, lengthy rivers and the recesses of space. Born in Cuba, she learned painting from her grandmother, who wasn’t allowed to further her studies because women were barred from advanced classes.
When Rubio was 14, her family fled to Puerto Rico. Her father, an engineer, decreed that everyone would have to study a practical profession. Rubio chose architecture because she saw it as a combination of art and engineering.
Not everyone saw the connection. “Architects are scared of art, because they’re not trained in it,” she said. When she taught architecture at Harvard and Parsons, she assigned readings on art theory and aesthetics to bridge the divide.
After 10 years of practicing and teaching architecture, the divide became too great for her to bear. She quit her job to paint full-time. “I saved $5,000, moved to Long Island City and just painted,” she recalled. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”
In 1998, she returned to Cuba and painted landscapes there, particularly the Viñales Valley. For guidance, she turned to America’s first art movement: the Hudson River School painters of the 19th century, such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, who painted majestic and mystical interpretations to give Americans a sense of pride about their nascent nation.
Rubio was also interested in using the medium of landscape painting to make a political statement but, in this case, it was about Cuba’s instability. She used many Hudson River School techniques but painted famous views from unconventional angles and saturated the land in deep red tones, to suggest a world off-kilter and on fire. After leaving Cuba, she traveled through South America, retracing the routes that Church had taken on a painting trip 150 years earlier and painting many of the same landscapes.
In 2019 she moved to Hudson and began teaching at Olana, Church’s residence. Rubio’s “Notes from the River #1,” part of the Butterfield show, reinterprets the view of the Catskills that Church used in his 1845 painting, “Catskill Creek, N.Y.”
Rubio trades Church’s primordial sunrise with the deep blues of twilight and geographical coordinates of Hudson that she found from online maps. Her paintings inspired by deep-space photographs taken by the James Webb telescope and overlaid with star maps echo the same themes: the tension between the systems of measurement that humans have created and infinite spaces that can’t be measured.
“People told me not to paint the river,” she said. “Nobody paints marines anymore, it’s passe — so I painted 45 of them.” Any landscape with water is especially interesting to her as a painter because the water is always changing in relation to the sky. “When you have water, you’ll see more changes in the land than you would in a landscape without water,” she said.
In 2019, concerned about the effects of pollution and climate change on the Hudson, she created a series of erasable paintings. Viewers were invited to erase and redraw. “Obviously, that’s a risky thing to do,” Rubio said. “It’s taboo to touch a painting. But if we destroy nature, we have a responsibility to restore it.”
The Butterfield Library, at 10 Morris Ave. in Cold Spring, is open daily.
