REBECCA PURDUM PHOTO:MATTHEW THORSEN

In the solitude of the Ripton woods, a 49-year-old painter is painstakingly producing some of the most exquisite abstractions in America today. Rebecca Purdum’s all-enveloping dreamscapes of unnamable colors have earned her critical acclaim and attracted collectors from New York and beyond. But she remains virtually unknown in Vermont 13 years after moving here with her husband, Tom Moran, who is now chairman of the Chinese department at Middlebury College.

Her debut show in the Green Mountains may have ended the era of Purdum’s local obscurity, however. Three of her large-scale canvasses were enough to set an entire room aglow in the Middlebury College Museum of Art, which hosted the tantalizing exhibit that closed last week. Emmie Donadio, the museum’s chief curator, says the pieces she selected for the show resonated with the force of revelation. Purdum’s mysterious, misty compositions pulled some viewers back again and again for immersion in her meditative tones and textures.

David Bumbeck, a nationally known printmaker and former head of Middlebury’s art department, took in Purdum’s show five times during its seven-week run. “I was overwhelmed,” he says. “Her work is absolutely astonishing. She’s one of the greatest living artists I’ve seen.”

Purdum’s paintings offer a purely visual experience. They have no recognizable subject matter, nor do they elicit associations with the material world. Her work has been likened to the studies in color and light that Turner conducted via his sea scenes and Monet undertook in his waterlilies series. But Purdum’s style is not derivative in the least. Her paintings have no obvious antecedents, yet she is able to discuss them with clarity, which is rare among artists who plumb spiritual depths.

The 9-foot-tall piece that centered her show and the two horizontal diptychs on flanking walls were all painted in “blue non-colors,” she explains. That may sound cryptic to someone who hasn’t seen Purdum’s work. But it’s an apt description of canvasses covered with a variety of oils that somehow coheres into a whole independent of its parts.

This paradoxical effect reflects what Purdum describes as her “love/hate relationship with color.” She clearly revels in the sensuousness of the hues she uses, even as she strives to neuter their individual identities — because, she says, color’s impact is “so strong, too strong, always pulling one way and then the other.”

Purdum aims to affirm the integrity of a painting by erasing herself from its creation. The visions she conjures seem to have magically appeared on canvas; there’s no trace of human agency in the form of brushstrokes or even finger marks. Purdum applies paint mainly with her hands — initially because she couldn’t afford to buy brushes. But now she uses oversized rubber gloves rather than the surgeon’s gloves that, she says, left the signs of physical involvement she wished to obliterate.

The point, Purdum emphasizes, is to allow a painting to become itself. Unavoidably, she says, her own thoughts and emotions spill onto a surface as she begins to apply whichever color is most plentiful in her paint box. “One by one, these ideas and feelings go away,” she relates. “My argument becomes weaker and weaker until there’s only the painting left.”

This transition can be a trance-like process. That was the case with “Passenger,” one of the roughly 10-foot-long diptychs that hung in the Middlebury show. “I really felt carried along by this painting,” Purdum recounts in a recent conversation at the museum. She points to a dense, dark expanse at the top of “Passenger,” which, she explains, serves to keep the otherwise radiant piece “earth-bound.”

Similar boundary markers can be discerned in “Static,” the show’s centerpiece, as well as in some of the earlier paintings that Purdum chooses to display during a visit to her studio. “Static,” painted last year, does have the bluish complexion the painter notes. But the perimeter of the piece has been scraped into a flatness that forms a sort of frame, accentuated by vertical orange slashes. This arrangement emerged in order to focus the viewer’s eye on the painting, Purdum suggests. After all, in her oeuvre, “the painting always directs what happens.”

If such pronouncements seem twee, be assured that Purdum is no poser. She’s earnest but affable, demure but not coy. Clad in a tailored white shirt that complements her petite form, she seems dwarfed by the almost monumental paintings leaning against the white walls of her high-ceilinged studio, which is lit by four skylights. Purdum laughs easily, and speaks eagerly about her elusive works while avoiding the self-promotion rife in urban markets. Yet she is very much a star in that scene.

Born in Idaho, Purdum was raised in California, Connecticut and other coastal states as her father, a U.S. Navy submarine captain, moved from port to port. Her mother was an amateur landscape and still-life painter. Purdum settled in Manhattan after graduating from Syracuse University, where she majored in art and discovered that “painting abstractly made perfect sense to me,” she says.

Her early career was steeped in self-doubt. But Purdum summoned enough courage one day in 1984 to join a snaking queue of young artists waiting to have their slides assessed by Jack Tilton, owner of a prominent, eponymous Manhattan gallery. Purdum says she had long envisioned showing her paintings in this rounded corner space on West 57th Street, opened 20 years earlier by Betty Parsons. A sculptor as well as an art dealer, Parsons was a pioneering champion of painters who went on to become big names in Abstract Expressionism.

“That gallery was filled with ghosts,” Purdum reflects. Indeed, her Ripton studio contains a paint-splattered chip of flooring that she chiseled up when Tilton moved to his current space farther uptown.

Purdum beams as she recalls Tilton responding positively to her own slides after dismissing the samples presented by others in that line. A year later, she was included in a group show at the gallery of her dreams, and several solo shows followed.

Purdum grew so successful during her 11-year sojourn in New York that she was able to earn a living solely from her art. But she doesn’t like talking about the business aspect of her career — she declines to reveal the prices her paintings fetch. They do sell quickly, however — in part because Purdum shows only once every few years. It takes her about four months to complete a painting, she says, and most of that time is spent staring at the canvas and considering what to do.

That sort of decision making isn’t easy, she notes. “The way we look at things every day doesn’t involve seeing but is rather about judging,” Purdum says. “We judge what we look at in order to know what to do next. Abstraction is challenging because it gives no clues about what to do next. It demands we see, not judge.”

Purdum insists on stripping art down to its visual essence, ridding it of all recognizable references. She thereby strives to reinforce “the wall” that she sees ideally separating art from life. To Purdum, it’s a profound distinction reflected in her self-definition as a “painter” rather than an “artist.”

“Artists today have been breaking down the last bits of wall between art and life,” she says. “Abstract painters like myself are putting those bits back into place. My own materials and process work best behind the safety of that wall.”



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