BYU Art Faculty Sustains BYU Legacy and Adds New Perspective on the Modern World
Madeline Rupard’s days as new full-time faculty within the BYU Department of Art are busy showing paintings, teaching classes, working on her book for Slow Worm Press, acting as department representative and mentoring students on a trip to New York City.
This is Rupard’s first year as full-time faculty, but she’s benefited from and contributed to BYU’s Department of Art for years. She received her bachelor’s degree in studio art from BYU in 2016. As an undergraduate student, she learned from some of the faculty still in the department, and as a visiting professor, she helped the school through the creative challenges of COVID-19. In between those times in the department, she earned an MFA with distinction in painting from Pratt Institute and also taught there.
In our Q&A, Rupard talks about integrating modern and religious themes into her art, and her personal and professional legacy.
Q: What brought you to BYU?
Rupard: BYU is very unique in its vision and I had a great experience here. My faith was strengthened here as a student.
I saw a faculty member serving in a Young Single Adult (YSA) ward as a clerk and realized people practiced what they preached. They were here really living the gospel and in simple, humble ways. They were true to their beliefs and were creating rigorous, highly intelligent work. The fact that those things were happening at the same time was inspiring and exciting to me
I also met people who encouraged me to go on a mission. My faith grew while at BYU, so the idea of coming back and doing the same thing for others was a pay-it-forward scenario that I liked.
Q: Where did you serve a mission? Did it impact your work?
Rupard: I served in Hungary. My great-grandmother is from a village in Hungary which made that very special, and family history is always part of my work. For inspiration, I have made pilgrimages back to Hungary to the village where my grandmother is from, to my childhood home in Maryland, and to the town of an artist ancestor in Northern Pennsylvania, Jenny Augusta Brownscome. Although her work is pretty different in tone than mine, she was a rare successful woman artist of the late 19th century, who graduated from Cooper Union in New York, lived there for many years, and travelled to Europe to study from the masters. She is from the British side of my mother’s heritage and is in history books for her painting, “Thanksgiving at Plymouth.”
I’m curious about the different ways of living, perceiving, and thinking in different time periods. I’m always searching for meaning from the past.
Q: It is interesting that you say heritage has influenced your work. It’s Americana. Would you say it’s also a bit counterculture or at least modern?
Rupard: People do sometimes look at it and ask, ‘Why are you including Love’s gas station?’ But that’s part of the American tradition in some ways: gas stations, highways, the great American road trip. I would say that I consider myself a Realist. It’s important for me to include those details.
I include things that are often thought of as mundane or ordinary — or even vulgar — like the idea of a McDonald’s, fast food in a commercial space against the sublime mountains. I like to see the everyday next to the overtly beautiful and divine because I find there lies an opportunity for redemption. I paint a gorgeous sunset, but there’s a gas station in front of it. That’s part of what makes it more believable to me and less like an escapist fantasy. It feels more like the reality we live in: a constant mix of contradictions and complicated things: beauty and mundanity.
Q: Why is paint your most common medium? Do you feel it serves this theme of reality and the divine particularly well?
Rupard: I do. Painting is a low-tech activity. You’ve got mud and pigment and oil or, in my case, with acrylic, chemicals and water that you are just pushing around on a piece of wood. It’s a really strange thing to do in a highly technical world. In a global world it’s almost a Luddite thing to do, but it is also romantic and timeless.
We’ve been painting as humanity since the caves at Lascaux and before that. It’s a human impulse to record imagery and now we can do it so easily with phones. Why would you go through the effort to learn how to render and technically paint something? To me, it is that handmadeness that makes a statement in a time when everything is accelerated and digitized. It’s an act of stubbornly deciding I’m still going to make paintings that combine the perception of my eyes and the humanness of the hand.
Q: How did your study at BYU influence this appreciation of timelessness in subject and medium?
Rupard: There is something about painting where you feel like you are always in conversation with the past. As a student at BYU, I felt that my professors did a great job of teaching me the importance of painters that came before me and how to contextualize my work in a modern moment. For example, on a study abroad program with BYU in England. I fell in love with medieval Italian painters like Paolo Uccello and Giovanni Bellini—I started to feel like these medieval painters were my artist ancestors. I’m not literally related to Giovanni Bellini, but I feel connected to that tradition and I believe drawing from the past gives the present power.
Q: What can you tell me about your art currently on display?
Rupard: I have a piece in the Church History Museum right now called “Jesus Painting Painting.” It’s a painting of a reproduction of the “Resurrected Christ” by Harry Anderson, a painting in my ward building in Brooklyn, New York. I walked into church late one day, saw it, and thought, I have to paint this — including the fluorescent light, including the ventilation. This is where I truly am a Realist. To me, it is very important to include the “unsightly” or “ordinariness” of the situation in which we encounter this kind of miraculous painting as modern LDS members. It’s important to include the familiar carpeting, the lighting system, the tile and side-paneling of walls in church buildings. In this I find humor, an elevation of the mundane, and a strange comfort in the familiar while pondering divine themes. Right now that painting is curated by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts into a show called “Work and Wonder” in Salt Lake and it is on display right next to the original painting, which I’m thrilled about.
To view more of Madeline Rupard’s art, visit her website.