Kent Rucker's Art

 Andrew Wyeth was quoted as saying that pencil is not in competition with watercolor.

For me that's the gospel folks. While I have learned to draw with my brush, I like the security of having those little graphite landmarks. Watercolors are like food, they continues to cook after the fire is turned off.  I went to Michigan many years ago to be the best man in a wedding. I always take my paint kit. The humidity in Michigan is about three times what it is in Colordo. I painted, but the paint took forever to dry. Slow cooker

The painting of Rebecca was from a series of portraits I completed using some of the staff I worked with when I taught elementary art in the public school sector.

Below the 'detail', is the complete painting.

I was intrigued with how the background could resonate with the portrait.

At this time I was also toying with the idea of becoming a portrait painter. I would suddenly become aware that I was sitting between two people sometimes strangers sometimes friends with their photo album on my lap. They were opening up their life to me. Together we would chose several photos from their private lives.  We arrived at a price.I required  half up front to  buy materials. I took slides of their photos and would work up three different composition. They would choose the one they liked the best. This method plus the use of a slide projector for likeness pretty much guaranteed the customers satisfaction with  the painting. I delieved the painting and received the remainder of my fee.

For many years I painted works that had a Christian theme. As in the painting below entitled, CRISSCROSSWORDPUZZLE.

The original title was simply Cross Fire.

Manet, Goya, Van Eyke, Masacio, Millet all make an appearance in this painting.

For me so much of watercolor painting is leaving areas blank, and using a few of the seventeen or so watercolor techniques for variety. Water is such a marvelous magical molecule. Think about it sometimes. Make a list of all the things that you know water can do. Then ask yourself 'What whould happen if I added paint to that property?'

e.g. to ice, to steam?

These next two paintings came from a series of sketches I made of a contemporary dance at a center for the arts and humanities in Colorado. I later showed them to the dancers who were able to pick themselves out of  the scene.The titles are fictitious. I couldn't remember the group's name or the name of the piece.

The 'Moire' series  had it's beginning in 1978. This was a difficult time for me. I was working three part time jobs, student teaching in two different cities, no car, my mouth was being used as project for a graduating dental student, and I was failing fuctional math without which I would not be able to graduate. I had a family to support and I wasn't doing a very good job of it. Now as an artist in a fuctional  math class, I was introduced to some exciting concepts such as set theory and venn diagrams and moire. I began to intersect layers of objects on top of each other. Sets of sticks on top of patterned fabric on top of leaves etc. I turned out some interesting still lives. Moire is a french word that discribes  the phenonmenon that results when two or more regular patterns move across one another as in the folds of a curtain moved by the wind or a fence that moves over it's own shadow, a third pattern is formed. Musical harmony or dissonance is analogous.