An Interview With Madeline Rupard

From the Utah desert to the bustling streets of Brooklyn, Madeline Rupard's journey across the American landscape deeply informs her captivating paintings. Having lived in Maryland and Georgia before earning her art degrees from Brigham Young University and Pratt Institute, Rupard views the nation with the knowing eyes of a frequent traveller. Her art captures a sense of fleeting wonder, a solitary observation of places we pass through rather than settle within. Through her brushstrokes, she masterfully explores the fascinating contradictions woven into the fabric of America: the suburban alongside the sublime, the sacred intertwined with the mundane, and the timeless colliding with the contemporary.

Can you tell us a little bit about you?

I am the great-granddaughter of Hungarian and German peasants who came to America due to wars and strife in their respective countries. Fate threw me into being in 1991, where I was born in Utah and moved to Maryland around four. I had a happy and bewildering childhood with the dawn of the internet, growing evangelization of fresh-mex restaurants, weekend trips to the Smithsonian, Circuit City and Best Buy to look at computer games like Sims: Hot Date expansion pack that dad wouldn’t let me get. I grew up in girl world, surrounded by sisters, lots of Polly Pockets, glitter and make believe. Even our pets were all girls, girl rescue dogs, girl cats, girl pet lizards, girl hamsters. We lived in the suburbs against the same forests that the Blair Witch Project were filmed in; they felt full of mythos, adventure, fear. There was some scary stuff going on in the region. Dad was on call at the Pentagon during 9/11 and mom made us stay in the car at the school bus stop during the DC sniper shootings. Maybe that’s why we moved to Georgia in high school, where I always felt like a foreigner. College years brought me back to Utah for undergrad at Brigham Young University where I fell in love with medieval italian paintings in England. I declared myself an art major, made a lot of work, got into grad school at Pratt in Brooklyn and then onward to the rest of my life. Last year I was hired as an Assistant Professor of Art at BYU. Now I paint and teach again out West.

You've lived in diverse landscapes, from the Utah desert to the East Coast. How have these different environments shaped your perception of the American landscape and its representation in your art?

Yeah, the last 7 or so years have been a bit vagabond, scrappy, driving across the country multiple times for new jobs, 1099 form jobs, month-to-month sublets and catsitting, working in a gallery, attending art fairs, schlepping heavy Ikea bags full of stuff around Brooklyn, buying cheap seats at the baseball games, 70 packs of eggs and big jars of kimchi from Costco, parking tickets, etc. While some of the most precarious, I have loved these years more than most of my life and they have overwhelmingly been the source of my current imagery, particularly those solo cross-country trips. Those pink sky mornings waking up in a hotel in Nebraska, or the golden hour in Wyoming driving west: that’s my bread and butter. These mid-continental regions feel underrepresented to me in American painting, so I enjoy taking them on. And although I’m teaching again, that constant sense of moving on from place to place is still the state of my soul. I’ve tried to grow roots, but I feel a restlessness and an inability to stay put for very long.

How do you choose the specific locations or scenes that you paint? What draws you to them?

I keep about 200,000 photos on my aging Iphone SE phone (Still got that middle button #resisttheupdate). Every day my battery life gets shorter and my phone gets slower due to my image hoarding, yet I keep taking 20 photos of the same reference. I’m always looking for a photo that feels like if I paint from it, something new can be drawn out of it through the process of painting. Rather than just pure reproduction of photo. I am especially drawn to tricky or interesting lighting situations. Like an evening fog or a glowing reflection in a sidewalk puddle.

Your work often depicts a sense of transient observation, of passing through rather than settling. Can you elaborate on this feeling and how you translate it onto canvas?

To me this question is about the car. I am both in love with and indicted by the car. I find great comfort and freedom in the combustible engine as someone that has enjoyed the liberating feeling of driving across this continent many times. At the same time, the car is a fitting metaphor for the modern condition; a climate-controlled metal encasement that “protects” you from the world, keeps you from having to interact with it and people in a meaningful way. The car implies a give-and-take between freedom and responsibility, loneliness and connection. Not to mention pollution and air inversion. Yeah, I’m torn on the morality of the car. Perhaps owning cars perpetuates a feeling of disconnectedness with the land and its people as we zoom through the country with our pop music and our icy drinks. But at the same time, damn it feels so good to hit the gas and drive off from a place you really want to leave. Maybe I want that feeling in a painting.

What are some of the challenges you face when trying to capture the vastness and complexity of the American landscape?

Making the "feeling" of a landscape into a good painting is always a formidable task. Every time that I start one, it’s like I experience amnesia where I forget how hard it is. I have this dumb hope it will all work out. Then a few hours in I quickly remember that painting is actually very difficult. I sand things down a lot, I start again, I wish I hadn’t overworked that one part, that I had let it be, how do I get back to that beginning hopeful state?! It’s a nightmare. But I keep comin’ back.

Do you hope your work inspires a more critical engagement with the visual culture that surrounds us? What kind of impact do you envision it having on viewers' perceptions of images?

If I’m arguing for anything, it’s for closer attention. I think the mundane is dismissed every day, yet it is the stage in which our stories and lives play out. Why is it that when we recall a time or place, we recall the way the golden light hit the wall of our office, or the strange décor in our grandma’s cabinet, or the color of snow at twilight? A little while ago, I had a crazy month where a brilliant friend died, I went through a break up, and I got hit by a car while crossing the street (on Friday October the 13th!!!) all within the same stretch of a few weeks. Perhaps it’s the cliché, but I don’t care: every day after those three events I woke up with a visceral sense of gratitude for light and life. I’d walk by a tree outside my apartment and see it for the first time. Even the mundane discomfort and pain of everyday life like stubbing your toe or difficult emotions all the sudden felt like a miracle, because it was a reminder that I was alive. And to be alive is such an impermanent, strange, and wild thing.

Are there any artists or movements that have particularly influenced your work?

Yeah I love some of those medieval Italian painters right before the renaissance like Paolo Uccelo and Giovanni Bellini. You could tell they were trying very hard to “figure it out”, perspective, atmosphere, and painting in the third dimension. Edward Hopper is one of my dads, for sure. I particularly admire those artists working in and around New York in the midcentury who were making representational paintings at a time when it was thought of as passé. Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, and Wayne Thiebaud (he a Californian) come to mind. I deeply appreciate and love the Abex movement too and the premise of abstraction, like the ethereal, urgent, and aqueous qualities in the work of Helen Frankenthaler and William de Kooning. I admire De Kooning’s ambition to make work that was simultaneously figurative and abstract. I guess I’d say I have great respect for trailblazers, but after the trails have been blazed, it’s easy to just make fan fiction of their conquests or to chase the newest trend for any residual clout. The more difficult task, in my opinion, is to take the well-trodden path and reinvent it, help someone see it in a fresh way. “The true messianic task is to resurrect the old within the discourse of the new” - Susan Buck Morrs’ “Dialectics of Seeing” in her book on Walter Benjamin, he a kindred modern mind with an ancient heart.

What are you currently exploring or experimenting with in your work? Are there any new directions you'd like to take your art in the future?

Moving back to the Utah desert air has given me such unbelievably short drying times (5 minutes if you’re lucky!) that I’ve decided to move back into oil painting after a decade away. I’m loving the ability to rework things for a few hours. I’m wondering why I waited so long to return.

What is your favourite book or film and why?

"The Student" by Anton Chekhov, short story. Chekhov was a modernist, but with a deep love for Tolstoy and the classics. This piece articulates so well the fascinating relationship between past and present. I think it also embodies Chekhov's inner conflict of romantic and realist. I am always trying to make amends between these two impulses.

Are you working on any projects you are particularly excited about?

I am in a group show “Even Cowboys Get the Blues” opening up in Somerset, UK next week at Black Paper Gallery in Bruton, which is cool! I have a show in Salt Lake City this fall at Material Contemporary, an artist-run gallery downtown. My friend Drew Rane who is a fantastic painter and I are making dreamy landscapes of the West. And I’m going to China in the spring. Maybe some cool paintings will come of that.

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