Born in the Utah desert, artist Madeline Rupard spent her formative years in Silver Spring, Maryland and Augusta, Georgia. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Brigham Young University and an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where she currently resides. Rupard’s paintings consider the American landscape as one who has moved through it frequently. A sense of wonder and transient observation is instilled in her pictures. Her paintings explore the tensions between the suburban and the sublime, the sacred and the mundane. For Rupard, art is a reconciliation between the romantic and the realist. “Modern Land” is Rupard’s most recent body of “non-comic” work:

“At the end of 2021, I packed all my possessions into my 2002 Subaru Forester and drove across the US from Utah back to New York City. It was a bittersweet time: the end of a relationship and a job I loved, silver-lined with the sense of new beginnings and the thrill of the unknown. The swiftly moving American highway seemed to mirror my internal wrestlings of freedom and heartbreak. Passing through deserts and plains alone, I felt connected to a greater collective memory of the American landscape and the people that have passed through before me. How and where, precisely, does the personal tap into the universal? Why is it that we feel a certain pang driving by a desert gas station at twilight? And how can atmosphere and color engage our emotions? Resuming life as an artist in the city, I began to explore through painting that state of wonder I felt as a transient observer just passing through. A friend recently recommended a film by Hong Sang-soo called “On the Beach At Night Alone” (2017). The words of the protagonist spoke to my experience as she described her travels abroad: ‘Sometimes the loneliness made me tremble. But there’s pleasure in that too.’”

See more from “Modern Land” below!