ROB COUTEAU: ABOUT

Rob Couteau is a visual artist and literary author from Brooklyn and is currently represented by the Roshkowska Galleries.

Artwork:

As a visual artist, Couteau works primarily in oil. Many of his paintings explore variations on the female nude and are inspired by working directly with a model. Since 2015 his work has been featured at the Roshkowka Galleries in Windham, NY, and is also featured by Roshkowska at artsy.net.

In 2019, Couteau embarked upon a new series of paintings of women wearing hats, using watercolor crayons, cray-pas, and oil paint on claybord, gessobord, and canvas. This series follows his women wearing veils, first begun in 2016.

From August 2011 to May 2012, Couteau completed "Eighty-seven Variations on Titian's 'Venus of Urbino,'" a series of paintings and drawings that attempt to reinterpret this single Renaissance masterpiece.

Several of his larger-than-lifesize nudes were shown at the Varga Gallery in Woodstock, New York, from September 2009 to March 2010.

In 2009, he devoted a year to reinterpreting the work of Picasso. The complete collection is composed of 67 oil paintings, 150 works on paper, and 16 sculptures in terra cotta. The Van Buren Gallery in New Paltz hosted his one-man show, “A Year with Picasso: A Reinterpretation of Major and Minor Works,” which ran from January 9, 2010 to February 21, 2010. The exhibit featured a reading from Couteau's poetry collection, The Sleeping Mermaid, which includes several poems portraying specific Picasso paintings.

Selected exhibitions:
* Roshkowska Galleries, Windham, NY. Selected works, Dec.2015-present.
* Varga Gallery, Woodstock, NY. Group show, 12 September 2009 - 12 March 2010.
* Van Buren Gallery, New Paltz, NY. “A Year with Picasso: A Reinterpretation of Major and Minor Works,” 9 January - 21 February 2010.
* Unison Gallery, New Paltz, NY. “Atmosphere (Mini-Works).” Group show, 31 August - 28 September 2009.

* * *

Literary work:

Couteau's publications have been praised in the Midwest Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Evergreen Review, Witty Partition, and the New Art Examiner. His work has been cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Tyrone Simpson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen’s Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless. His interviews include conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso’s model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. He has appeared several times as a guest on Len Osanic’s Black Op Radio and on Monocle 24 in Europe.

Critical Reception:
In his Introduction to More Collected Couteau, author James Dempsey writes: "Having spent many years as a journalist, I believe I have some ability to recognize and admire an artful interviewer, and Couteau is a master. His preparation is comprehensive, meticulous, and profound. His understanding of the process of writing in so many genres allows him insights into the particular problems faced by the writers he interviews…. You'll also find herein Couteau's writings on literature, which I hesitate to call criticism since they lack the worst features of much literary criticism, which can be clogged with so much pretentiousness, cant, and philosophical obfuscation that it would take a plunger of Brobdingnagian proportions to restore a healthy flow. Couteau's essays are often rhapsodic appreciations and evocations of the work under study, and are stuffed with both insights and joy."

In a review of The Sleeping Mermaid for the Midwest Book Review, Willis M. Buhle says: “Novelist and literary enthusiast Rob Couteau brings readers part of his love with The Sleeping Mermaid, a book of flowing poetry and thought that asks plenty of questions and offers plenty of answers. The Sleeping Mermaid is a poetry collection well worth considering.” And in an Introduction to the book, the biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno writes of how the author’s “poetic excursions take us to many places: to the Paris of Rimbaud and Picasso, to the Native North Americans, to mythology and history and how the woman he is encountering is seducing him as he seduces her (and us), and finally, how alone, the cosmos plays itself out at 3 a.m. when the only lap dog is memory.”

Author Jim Feast, in his Evergreen Review essay on Doctor Pluss and Collected Couteau, remarks upon the author's “Intellectual freshness, richness, and potency,” adding: “An impressively creative writer, whom Barney Rosset urged me to review.” Rosset, the former owner of Grove Press and the first American publisher of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet, led the legal battle to publish D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

Collected Works:
* poems from the late twentieth century. (This chapbook is now part of the Special Collections of New York University, Yale University Library, Colby College, Michigan State University Libraries, Northwestern University, and UCLA Library.)
* Doctor Pluss.
* Collected Couteau: Poems, Letters, Essays, Interviews.
* The Sleeping Mermaid. With an Introduction by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno.
* Portraits from the Revolution. Interviews with the Protestors from Occupy Wall Street, 30 Spetmeber - 8 October 2011.
* More Collected Couteau: Essays and Interviews. With an Introduction by James Dempsey.
* Selected Poems. With an Introduction by Ed Foster.
* A Blind Man Crazy for Color. A Tribute to Leon Angely: Illustrated by Picasso's Model and Muse, Sylvette David.

Most of these books are now part of New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections section, indexed in the "Downtown Writer's" archive.

Writing Published in Periodicals:
Over one hundred excerpts of Couteau’s work have appeared in forty-five magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including The Alembic; Anima; Arete; Bloomsbury Review; Blueline; Cadillac Cicatrix; Chrysalis; Colere; Confluent Educational Journal; Croton Review; Dichtung Yammer: The European; Footwork; The Garden State; Emerging Civil War; Evergreen Review; Garrison: A Journal of History and Deep Politics; Hawaii Pacific Review; Heavenbone; The Humanist; Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy; KennedysandKing; Lapis; Lift Magazine; Mochila Review; New Leaves Review; Occupy the Press; Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology; Open Road Integrated Media; Out of Our; The Paris Voice; Passager; Psychological Poems: Journal of Outsider Poetry; Quantum; Rain Taxi; Rockhurst Review; Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture; Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Venice Magazine; Versitude; West Hills Review; White Pelican Review; Witty Partition; Xanadu; and Z Miscellaneous.

Interviews with Other Authors:
* Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: “The Biographer of Paul Bowles and Other Expatriates Talks about Writing the Outsider’s Story: An Interview with Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno,” Bloomsbury Review, March 1991, and later featured in Collected Couteau.
* Ray Bradbury: “The Romance of Places: An Interview with Ray Bradbury,” Paris Voice, November 1990; Quantum: Science Fiction & Fantasy Review, spring 1991; and Nelson Thornes Framework English Resource Book 2, ed. Geoff Reilly and Wendy Wren (Cheltenham, (U.K.: Nelson Thornes Ltd., 2003). The complete interview was featured in Conversations with Ray Bradbury (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004) and in Collected Couteau.
* Hubert Selby: “Defining the Sacred: Hubert Selby on Spirituality, the Creative Will, and Love,” Rain Taxi Review of Books (online), December 1999. The complete interview later appeared in Collected Couteau.
* Albert Hofmann: “Albert Hofmann: An Appreciation. A Brief Interview with the Discoverer of LSD,” Rain Taxi Review of Books, June 2008.
* Michael Korda: “The Charmed Life: A Conversation with Michael Korda,” Rain Taxi Review of Books (online), summer 2010.
* Jeffrey H. Jackson: “Remembering the Deluge: An Interview with Jeffrey H. Jackson,” Rain Taxi Review of Books (online), December 2010.
* Robert Roper: “An Interview with Robert Roper, Author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War,” Emerging Civil War (online), October 2011.
* William Scott: “An Interview with William Scott, Author of Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker,” tygersofwrath.com, October 2011.
* Justin Kaplan: “The Mystery of the Man: Justin Kaplan Talks about America’s Greatest Poet,” tygersofwrath.com, December 2011.
* Robert J. De Sena: “The Miracle of Unity. Peace Mediator Robert J. De Sena Discusses How He Offers Gang Members a Way Out,” tygersofwrath.com, September 2014.
* Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: “When Feeling is First.' A Conversation with Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno About E. E. Cummings's Prose Masterpiece, The Enormous Room,” tygersofwrath.com, February 2015.
* Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: “Paying Attention. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno Discusses His New Book of Poems, The Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany,” tygersofwrath.com, February 2015.
* James Dempsey: “An Interview with Biographer James Dempsey, Author of The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer,” tygersofwrath.com, July 2015.
* Robert Roper: “A Conversation with Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita,” tygersofwrath.com, August 2015.
* Edward Halsey Foster: "‘If you are a poet, you help other poets.’ A Conversation with the Poet, Publisher, and Literary Historian Edward Halsey Foster," tygersofwrath.com, September 2016.
* Sylvette David: "An Interview with Picasso's Famous Model and Muse, Sylvette David: 'The Woman with the Key,'" tygersofwrath.com, January 2018. Abridged version at talismanmag.net, January 2018.
* Danny Goldberg: "Remembering the Magic Year: An Interview with Danny Goldberg," author of "In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea," Rain Taxi Review of Books (online), March 2018.
* Edward Halsey Foster: "Emanations of Pan," an interview with poet, publisher, and literary critic Ed Foster, Dichtung Yammer, August 2021.

Other Publications:
* The Role of the Least-Aspected Planet in Astrocartography. Planetary Symbolism in Astrocartography and Transcendental Astrology’’ (Reviewed in the Mountain Astrologer.) ISBN 0-9801880-0-8

External Links:
* Literary Publications by Author Rob Couteau. The Official Web Site.
* Review of More Collected Couteau: Essays and Interviews, Publisher's Weekly, Booklife, February 2016.
* Review of Portraits from the Revolution, Midwest Book Review, by Diane Donovan, November 2015.
* Monocle 24 radio interview with Rob Couteau on the death of Ray Bradbury, June 2012.
* Review of The Sleeping Mermaid, Midwest Book Review, by Willis M. Buhle, August 2010.
* “Defining the Sacred: Hubert Selby on Spirituality, the Creative Will, and Love.” Couteau’s interview with Hubert Selby.
* “Off the Palette: Rob Couteau.” Interview with Rob Couteau, HV Biz, 1 March 2010.
* “Best Bets for Sunday.” Review of “A Year with Picasso,” Times Herald Record, 14 February 2010.
* "Review of Rob Couteau at the Van Buren Gallery,” DWX blogspot, by Dan Wilcox, 7 February 2010.
* “Portrait Robert Couteau. Un americain a Paris,” by Alice Gaillard, Netsurf. Le magazine Internet, May 1998. Interview of Rob Couteau, in French, conducted in Paris