Paul Rucker

Photograph courtesy of Wendy Johnson © 2009

Portfolio of Artwork 949-955

Paul Rucker born April 29, 1968, in Anderson, South Carolina, is an interdisciplinary artist: a visual artist, composer, cellist, videographer, and animation artist. As he indicates in his interview published here, he does not separate the practices of these forms in which he works. For him, these practices are interconnected: “I make art but don’t differentiate among my art forms.” At the present time, he is completing a two-year residency at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he serves as the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Artist-in-Residence and Research Fellow (2013-2015). He has exhibited his visual art in museums, galleries, and other art venues in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, California, Washington, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, Washington, and other states. Winner of the 2015 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, dubbed “Best Artist” by the Baltimore Magazine, and judged the “Best Solo Show” by Baltimore City Paper, Paul Rucker has also been honored in other ways, including grants from the MAP Fund Performance, the Creative Capital, Conductive Garboil, 4Culture Project, and 10thAnnual Northwest Biennial (Tacoma Art Museum). He is a resident of Seattle, Washington.

In the interview that I conducted with him via email (October 2015), he thoroughly represents himself as a mixed media artist who, as one of his website declares,

combines media, often integrating live performance, sound, original compositions, and visual art. His work is the product of a rich interactive process, through which he investigates community impacts, human rights issues, historical research, and basic human emotions surrounding a subject.

from “Paul Rucker: Artist in Residence,” CreativeAlliance.org

I opened our interview with a question about his practices:

ROWELL:

What is your artist statement—written or unwritten? Is it the same for all three of your artistic practices, or do you have an artist statement for each practice: musical composition, visual art creation, and musical performance of others’ texts/productions?

RUCKER:

I make art but don’t differentiate between my art forms. Right now I combine everything together when I present. Even some live performances have visuals that accompany them. I am primarily a cross-disciplinary artist now. I truly work across the disciplines of visual art and music composition/performance.

ROWELL:

You are a composer, musician, and visual artist. When you are engaging in the practices of the one, do the ideational and the aesthetic demands of the others intersect with (make demands on) the production of the one? Or should I ask the question another way? What—if any—is the relationship between your practices as a composer and musician to those required of you as a visual artist?

RUCKER:

One I’ve been doing a lot longer than the other. I think we’re all born musicians and visual artists; those skills can develop at different rates if we pursue them. I’ve been playing professionally since I was twelve as a musician, but I’ve been working as a visual artist only for the past seven years. I dabbled in it for ten to fifteen years before then. Early on, when I learned to play double bass in elementary school, I found myself mentally linking visuals and audio. Each musical note represented a pitch, every dash and dot directed articulation. The scores became maps. I loved looking at them visually even when I had limited musical knowledge. Now as a visual artist, my work often incorporates musical images and notation, new composition, and manipulated sounds. If I’m making a visual piece, I think about sounds that could accompany the piece. If I’m making music, I often think about images. Sound itself often has colors, textures, shapes, and forms.

ROWELL:

How demanding is it for you to navigate among these three practices—demanding especially since each has its own language, medium or media, process, etc.?

RUCKER:

For me, it’s not demanding but natural to move among these practices. What’s demanding is balancing the deadlines for different projects!

ROWELL:

Although the product is of necessity different for each...