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What We Walk Past: Madeline Rupard’s Portraits of Faith

BYU Professor Madeline Rupard’s Latest Painting Examines the Everyday Spaces Where Latter-day Saints Worship

"Entrance" Painting
Photo Courtesy of Madeline Rupard

BYU professor Madeline Rupard’s painting "Entrance" captures a scene most Latter-day Saints have walked past without a second thought. It’s a chapel foyer in South Provo — neutral walls, maroon couch, soft lighting and a framed reproduction of Heinrich Hofmann’s "Christ and the Rich Young Ruler." For Rupard, that moment was worth returning to.

The placement of these common images matters, and so does the repetition. “You go to church and they’re just there,” Rupard said. “You’re not really thinking hard about them. I still stop and ponder sometimes, but they become background noise. Especially because they’re reproductions.”

“I kept trying to get photos of it when no one was in the lobby,” she said. “The space really entranced me, the way the natural light came in, and that painting … it’s one of my favorites of Christ.”

"Entrance" is part of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts’ UP(scale) exhibition, which asks artists to revisit a previous work and expand on it. For Rupard, that meant deepening the ideas behind her 2023 painting "Jesus Painting Painting," a smaller piece that set Harry Anderson’s "The Second Coming" in a Brooklyn chapel foyer, which she attended during her MFA at Pratt. It was a common foyer, and a common painting. Yet, the depiction of Christ among a sea of blue clouds hanging in its entryway still struck her as sacred.

"Jesus Painting" Painting
Photo Courtesy of Madeline Rupard

Both works focus less on the religious images themselves and more on the spaces that surround them. Rupard is interested in the everyday context of belief, where sacred imagery meets carpeted hallways, folding chairs and furniture that someone has to vacuum. “By painting them again, but also painting all the context around them, it’s able to give it a little bit of humor. But I’m totally sincere,” she said. “I have a rule that I only paint things I think are beautiful.”

Her paintings reframe familiar images in a way that encourages viewers to look again. Hofmann’s Christ instructs the rich young ruler to sell everything and follow him, but in Rupard’s painting, that message appears above a comfortable maroon couch. “There are tensions and ironies all around … in the lighting, in the décor, in the composition itself. They push and pull on aspiration, comfort, luxury, utility, familiarity, banality and sacredness,” as described in the statement for the exhibition.

She draws inspiration from Giovanni Paolo Panini’s eighteenth-century painting “Ancient Rome,” which depicts a room packed with imaginary art. “I was fascinated by this idea of the world you’re painting also containing its own paintings,” she said. “There’s something kind of cosmic about it. Like a world creating other worlds.”

Though she never intended to focus on religious art, Rupard has found that spiritual themes often emerge through the process of careful observation. A friend once told her that even her earlier, secular paintings felt religious. “I was really honored by that,” she said. “I liked the idea that my paintings could be religious without being overtly religious.”

The reception to her work has come from across the spectrum. Friends who left the Church have told her the paintings feel comforting and nostalgic. Others still active in their faith have said they appreciate the attention given to the ordinary. One essayist writing for “Wayfare” used her paintings in a piece about how the holy often resides in the everyday. Rupard welcomes all of it. “I think that’s the beauty of art,” she said. “People have their own interpretations. I like to keep it open-ended.”

For her, painting is a way to record and reframe what’s already there, not to dictate what should be seen. “These are the spaces where people worship,” she said. “They’re not perfect. But they matter.”