And then everything changed when he was 22. While on release from military service, Rubin backpacked across South America with friends. It was there, surrounded by lush landscapes and new people, that he discovered his passion for painting—but not before ingesting a psychoactive that gave him the key he needed to unlock his artistic potential. “I took a sort-of peyote in Ecuador,” says Rubin, “which showed me that there’s more than the eye can see, that somehow you have to trust your senses. Like the experience you have as a child, when you can focus on something so minute as an ant walking or your hair in a stream of water, I found the experience poetic and reminiscent of childhood memories.”
A couple weeks later, in Salar de Uyuni, a salt desert in southwest Bolivia, he picked up the brush in earnest for the first time. “We were traveling with a girl who had some watercolors and brushes. When I put my hand on the brush, in some godforsaken place with a beautiful landscape, that’s when it felt right. It felt like something I was supposed to do. Traveling and backpacking opened a door,” he says, “but I’m sure the peyote helped.” Although he found painting in South America, Rubin struggled for years to find his voice. “I had to find out who I was first. I knew my grandfather [Reuven Rubin], and I knew his work, but that was not me,” he says of his early life. “I needed to find my voice. That happened in New York.”
Rubin found his signature style at New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA) and later at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. “That was my initial four or five years, just training myself academically.” While he was in New York, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 struck the Twin Towers. The world and Rubin changed forever. “At SVA, I was painting from life: myself, my friends, models. After 9/11, I couldn’t look myself in the mirror. I could not make self-portraits anymore,” he says. “I was finished.”
“When I visited the Freud Museum two years ago, I began to think about how magazines looked when Freud fled Vienna in ‘38, just before the war. Eventually, I got a bunch of German magazines. For me, being Jewish from Israel, it was a heavy subject,” he says. “I started painting on them, erasing text or imagery. There was a dark undertone to the work that appealed to me.”
Even after completing the project, Rubin worried about how Holocaust survivors would react. “I was apprehensive about what actual survivors would think of the exhibit. If they found it abusive or hurtful in anyway, there was nothing I could do to make it better,” he says. An attendee at the Black Book exhibition quickly assuaged his fears. “This lovely artist, a good friend, brought her dad who is a Holocaust survivor, and he was in tears,” he says. “He was touched by it and especially moved by how I integrated the work, this heavy source material within the very personal space of Sigmund Freud, blending the personal memory with the collective one. They asked what I felt was different in this project from work I've done before, and I said, ‘It’s as if I was practicing for 15 years until I got to the Black Book.’”
With his artistic eye focused on the past, Rubin is still troubled by the future. “In my early 30s, I went to Auschwitz, and at the end of the visit, after a flood of tears, the guide said, ‘We have to remember, as I speak to you now, horrific things are being done.’” Rubin pauses, reflects, and mournfully says, “The world is not learning.” (Playboy)
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