Catalogue of Major Works
This catalogue documents 827 works of art produced between 1968 and 2018 by American artist Ed Rath. A biographical essay highlighting the major influences on the artist's work is included. With full color reproductions of every piece.
134 pages © Ed Rath 2019
Available on Blurb, ISBN Hardcover with dust jacket 9781715270476
New Yorkers, On The Move
Sixty portraits of New Yorkers riding the subway, Metro North Rail, and sitting in waiting rooms, drawn in Sumi ink, by New York artist Ed Rath.
66 pages © Ed Rath 2020
Available on Amazon, ISBN Softcover 9798605963257
Metropolis
In this new series, artist Ed Rath explores how architectural details color our consciousness. Imagery includes buildings under construction, loft interiors, classic brownstones, condemned buildings, and a demolition site, complete with New York City street scenes. Although inspired by specific sites and structures, Rath’s dynamic colors and distorted forms eschew common realism, taking the viewer on a tour celebrating life and urban energy. Thirty-one pages, full color illustrations.
31 Pages © Ed Rath 2019, Published on Amazon
ISBN Softcover 9781695902305
Portrait of Allan
In October of 2018 artist Ed Rath created twenty Sumi ink portraits of brain researcher Dr. Allan Hobson. These portraits were drawn from life at Dr. Hobson's Vermont farm. A few months later Rath developed three of these drawings into more complex portraits by adding symbolist and landscape elements. This picture book documents the creative process that led to the final images.
THE OTHER SIDE
Produced by David Johnson in conjunction with Ed Rath’s exhibition “The Other Side” at the Pottsville Museum in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, this book focuses on the transition in Ed Rath's artwork from landscape-based imagery to his cartoon like, animated tree imagery. In two short essays and an interview with Rath, David Johnson builds the case that Rath's 2004 painting "The Other Side" was the turning point image through which Rath faced the ramifications of his wife Laura's impending demise from breast cancer. In expanding this thesis, Johnson ascertains that Rath's animated tree series, which ensued three years after “The Other Side” was painted, represents a kind of alternate universe, an afterlife of sorts, peopled by soulless wooden beings. Through these comedic caricatures Rath critiques his deepest fears and feelings about society and his own life as an artist.
Forty full-color reproductions of Rath’s paintings and drawings, including two images of Rath's earliest paintings, shed new light on the work of this American painter, whose work comments on the human condition through the lens of his own personal narrative.
DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
A compilation of drawings, paintings, and annotations of fifty-two dreams and nightmares by American artist Ed Rath. Spanning the years 1971 – 2014, the artwork encompasses a broad range of dream subjects and faithfully illustrates, in brilliant color and sharp detail, the artist’s obsession with this highly personal and ephemeral subject matter.
THREE TOUCHSTONES
A book about three places in the Midwest that
inspired my landscape work
79 pages © Ed Rath 2013, Published on Blurb
ISBN Softcover 978-0-9890400-0-6
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Catalogue of drawings and paintings from 2009 - 2011
© Ed Rath 2011. 53 pages. Published on Blurb
Designed by Assa Bigger.
FOR THE PEOPLE – THE PAINTINGS AND WRITINGS OF ED RATH
Review: Discoveries :A KIRKUS service for self-published and independent
authors 2009
A painter plumbs dark subjects—anxiety, loss, 9/11—with a deceptively simple and bright style in this lush coffee-table art book. Rath, a Brooklyn artist, has a technique that might be called childlike if the child in question were a precocious Picasso. His acrylic-on-canvas compositions are flat and depthless; his figures are rudimentary and archaic to the point of cartoonishness; wind and the flight paths of insects are traced by curving vapor trails. But an unsophisticated look doesn’t mean a deficit of imagination, visual interest or creative resources. His landscapes and cityscapes—the bulk of the selection—teem with gnarled trees, creeping vines, buzzing wasps and ornate flowers, and throb with rich, chiaroscuroed colors—arresting red skies, black rivers, cool blue nightscapes. Yet the people who move through them seem too distracted and glum—such as the ones in the satirical “Happy Couples United in Heaven”—to notice their glowing surroundings. Rath uses this contrast between intense settings and numbed, depressive human affect to address a wide range of subjects. Some are personal, such as a series of paintings provoked by the death of his wife Laura; some, such as “Trickle Down Economics,” a portrait of a nude man rummaging through garbage, are overtly political. Rath’s 9/11 series features fireballs, panicky crowds and pensive subway riders. It seems that only when people are entirely absorbed into nature, as in “Old Couple,” a portrait of Rath and Laura as trees, that they can really be happy. The author includes some written meditations on his art and captions for a few of these superb color reproductions. Sometimes these writings are unnecessarily didactic (“This painting shows the thousands of people walking home to Brooklyn, while the World Trade Towers burn,” reads the caption for “Exodus”—and, sure enough, it does). But Rath’s more poetic reflections—“Laura came to me in dreams, beautiful and vigorous. She walked in a field of diamonds”—reinforce the impact of his already very expressive paintings. An engrossing feast for the eyes and the emotions.