Madeline Rupard, the Mundane, and the Sublime

Glen Nelson: Let's do a quick bio. On your website, madelinerupard.com, we read this: "I'm an artist and educator. I grew up moving frequently around different parts of the US and traveling across long distances. I paint pictures to describe the overwhelming sensory effect of the American landscape, the suburban in conjunction with the sublime, the mysterious in the mundane, and the ancient and manmade running up against each other. My work is also about floors, ceilings, and skies and negotiating the more immediate surfaces and materials of the canvas. Using a combination of opaque and translucent brushstrokes, I attempt to paint the art around objects." That sounds very grand and poetic. Did that take a long time to write, or is that just part of your DNA and it just rolled out?

Madeline Rupard: No, honestly, I'm listening to that now. I'm like, oh, I have some updates to make to that, to be honest. I went to grad school, so we learned to write a lot at Pratt. Actually my MFA program was at Pratt Institute and I graduated in 2019. But we really focused a lot on how to write. I think, to some students, that was an issue, but I quite enjoy writing about art. 

Glen Nelson: Visitors to your website will see a growing list of exhibitions, publications and interviews, as well as teaching gigs, lectures, and artist's residencies. So you've been really busy.

Madeline Rupard: Yeah, it's one of those things where we're always negotiating our free time as artists, and I've been lucky to get some cool opportunities. And I'm applying to some more this month. 

Glen Nelson: Fingers crossed for you. I've known you a little while. I think we were chatting earlier, it was 2017 or something, when you were just a wee one in school, but I feel like you and I see art in similar ways. I'd love to know a little about your current work, and how it fits into the bigger field of American Contemporary Art. Is that too broad of a question?

Madeline Rupard: No, I mean, I might answer it in two ways because you probably are looking at my website, which of course needs to be updated a little bit, but it's mostly my landscape work, like paintings of the American West like gas stations, paintings of like grocery stores, things that are kind of thought of as not really the subjects of fine art usually. In that sense, I would say I am very much of the school of—  My friend coined this term the other day. Do you know about the Ashcan movement? Of course you do, because you're a New Yorker and an artist. 

Glen Nelson: Actually, I was just in Philadelphia at that museum, and it has, you know, many, many, many. 

Madeline Rupard: Yeah, the Museum of Art out there? 

Glen Nelson: Yeah.

Madeline Rupard: Yeah, so if people are unfamiliar, the Ashcan movement was a bunch of artists that were painting the nitty gritty East Coast cities more under the theme of Realism. They were interested in portraying those things which are not thought of as always the most lovely or most picturesque European ideas of the landscape, but more to get a sense of the American voice, and what America has to offer aesthetically, and in terms of like subject matter. My friend coined this the other day. We were talking about art and she's like, I feel like you and I, because she's also a painter, are kind of Neo-Ashcan. We're interested in this idea of, okay, so now we don't have these old smokestacks that are a prominent part of our life, they still exist, but they kind of look ancient. But what do we actually spend our lives going through? For me, it's cars a lot of the time. I'm in my car a lot. I have a car in New York. And I'm interested in, instead of just ignoring those moments, but peering into them and saying, what does that mean about my life that I'm always in this vehicle that's passing through spaces? As you read in my bio, that has been my life. I've driven across America a couple times by myself, and moved a lot because my dad was in the army. I've seen this country from a lot of different angles and ideologies. I lived in the South for a while; I've lived in DC; I've lived in Utah. I'm curious about what that does to a person, to always be a stranger in a strange land, which is also arguably a part of the Mormon voice, you know.

Glen Nelson: And the American voice. 

Madeline Rupard: The American voice too, for sure.

Glen Nelson: You know, now that you say Neo-Ashcan, I'm like, okay, I see it. It's not gritty, necessarily, but it's a lot of atmosphere. 

Madeline Rupard: Right. That's where paint becomes fun. That's why paint is my medium, because people sometimes ask, well, why wouldn't you just take photos? I'm like, well, Stephen Shore already did that, first of all. Second of all, people like looking at paintings, and I like making them. I like the idea of playing with opacity. When I was in grad school, I took a class called Materials and Methods. People often overlook acrylic. They think it's just a beginner's medium. But I paint primarily in acrylic, for one reason because of my kind of impatient demeanor. But also because I fell in love with it in grad school, when we went to this store in the Lower East Side called Guerra acrylics [Guerra Paint & Pigments]. And it's this man who has been around for a long time selling acrylics he makes by himself. He makes these pigments, and he has different mediums. He has this book or Bible of different mediums and things you can put in. I learned I could change the opacity and mess with opacity. I do this more so with my larger work. I get kind of into the nitty gritty and different levels of working with big brushes. I just get a lot of joy out of that. At the end of the day, I have all these ideas that I might have said about the work, but I also just love colorful, pretty messy things.

Glen Nelson: For somebody who doesn't know what opaque means in the vocabulary of painting, how would you describe that?

Madeline Rupard: The ability to see through something or to not see through it. So opaque would be on the looks-solid end of the spectrum versus translucent, which means that you can see color. Sometimes I'll put a translucent, somewhat see-through sheen of fluorescent pink paint over something to give it a more vibrational quality in the color. I think there's a different quality to painting with layers than just painting mixing exactly the color you want.

Glen Nelson: Let's say you're at a party, and somebody comes up to you and says, "What do you do?" You say, "I'm an artist, I'm a painter," and they ask, "What do you paint?" That's probably their question. So what do you say to that?

Madeline Rupard: Every time I'm like, let's try something new. But I think to get right to the point, often I'll say, Well, I paint gas stations. Because it just gives them something kind of weird that she's painting, you know, and makes them wonder, well, why would you pay in gas stations?

Glen Nelson: So let me explore gas stations. So when I first moved to New York, I had some of those Ed Ruscha books of gas stations. How does your work differ from something like Ed Ruscha who went down a strip and took a photograph of every gas station on a strip, for example, and then later did some giant paintings based on gas stations?

Madeline Rupard: That's a good question. I like Ed Ruscha, I feel kinship with his subject matter, but the way he executes is very tight and geometric. I think that there's a part of me that gravitates to the messy and the handmade. I kind of think that's a slightly feminine thing. There's something about getting it all together, kind of making a little bit of a mess that feels connected to my intuitive experience of the world as a woman, if that makes sense. But also, that could be just my own idea. But I do think he has a little bit of an archival quality. And for me, it's a little bit more objective. I'd say he's standing back. You could argue that for me, as well, but I feel like it's always connected a little bit to my own personal narrative. In fact, I have another project that's more about a personal narrative essay comic. And that's actually a huge part of my work that I'm putting a lot of energy into right now.

Glen Nelson: I think both of you are documenting something. You're not going to go to one of his canvases and look for brushstrokes. That's what you're not gonna do. There's a flatness to them, and I think that's part of his message to it. But one of the things that I really respond to in your work is I just want to get closer and closer and closer to these works. Your Instagram feed is full of beautiful images. Most of them are exteriors, but not all of them. Do you think of them as landscapes? Or do you kind of shy away from that?

Madeline Rupard: No, I would say that's another way that I approach it. I say, I'm a landscape painter, which, I think I paint the American West. People often conjure up images of Ansel Adams when they think of American West art, or Ed Ruscha. I guess I would say that I like things to be a little funny. But I also only paint things that I truly find beautiful.

Glen Nelson: Yeah, well, let's talk about humor. So I find a lot of humor in your paintings, but they're not one liners. I think you find the incongruencies of contemporary life, like strange and wonderful resonances that are maybe unintended, but then you seem to want to capture them. How am I doing with that interpretation? Does that sound about right? 

Madeline Rupard: Yeah, I think that sounds right. I mean, they say when you're writing a novel, that the most important thing is a good conflict, right? I feel the same way about painting; you need good contradictions to make an interesting piece, whether that comes through formal choices or content. For me, there is a beauty to a Love's gas station against a blue sky, but you could look at it and be like, an impressionist touch on a Love's gas station is really a tender way to treat this thing which seems totally oblivious to our human perception of it, you know. There's a kind of childlike wonder you have as a kid in the backseat of a car as your parents are driving. I would be in the backseat of my parents car, and we'd be driving and I just remember being like, I wonder who lives Tooele, you know. Or just thinking about these different little cities in Utah or the East Coast and just wondering why we couldn't get off there and just live there. You know, there's a wonder to it I feel like exists in the human mind as it travels.

Glen Nelson: Do you have a really good visual memory? Or how do you capture some of these ideas and work them up into paintings?

Madeline Rupard: I take photos. I would say, visual memory? Yes. Sometimes I'll see something and I just know I need to paint it. But I don't work without a photograph. I find that in some ways I work a little bit like a photographer because I'll take many many photos and decide which one has the right kind of tension in the composition. It has to be something that it doesn't feel like it's complete yet; by painting it will be able to bring something else out of it.

Glen Nelson: Are you always on the prowl for ideas, or is it just part of your life?

Madeline Rupard: Always. Sometimes I'll just even be scooping kitty litter and be like, could I make an interesting painting of this? I'm interested in the mundane. That seems like a weird thing to bring up. But it's kind of an irony that we don't want normal jobs, but we're always working as artists; we're never turned off, always have to be thinking of something else. 

Glen Nelson: With your work, there's a kind of an irony to it, a paradox, but not detachment. Am I correct in that distinction? 

Madeline Rupard: Thank you. Yeah, you are.

Glen Nelson: So for example, there are a few images that connect to your religious practice recently. You go to church and see a tableau that cries out to you, that would make a pretty interesting painting. Is that how it works? They're not parodies, the way that I'm reading them, at least. 

Madeline Rupard: Yeah. My rule is that it has to be actually beautiful to me, and I have to find something beautiful about it for me to paint it. I am an orthodox member of The Church. I love what it's done for my life. I have my curiosities and questions about it that might be reflected in the images, but I also find by examining them I start to understand better what it means to move through these spaces as a member. And also give an opportunity for people who might be out of The Church, or who don't know anything about it, or maybe have a similar experience in a different religion, to feel like they see some familiar experience there, or maybe a little bit of humor that allows them to think about religion. 

Glen Nelson: One of the paintings that we published in The Season a few months ago was titled Jesus Painting Painting. Can you describe it for our listeners?

Madeline Rupard: Sure. I was late for church. I was walking into sacrament meeting, and there was no one in the hallway, because I was late. And I just saw this, you know, I go to church in East Brooklyn in this building that's definitely not originally a church house. It's kind of got low ceilings, and they turned it into a chapel. They have this one painting, it's the, I can't say off the top of my head who the artist is, but it's that very recognizable resurrection painting of Christ, and He's in this bluish tinted desert. 

Glen Nelson: Harry Anderson.

Madeline Rupard: Harry Anderson, thank you. Yeah. There was something about the lighting of that situation. There's the bright white fluorescent light directly shining on it, but around it it's that more yellow toned commercial building lighting. So that slight difference in yellow and white light was interesting to me, but also just the ubiquitous bookshelf underneath it, and tile floors, and then the textural half paneling that you always see in The Church. For some reason, we have a great contract with someone that makes these textures, very ubiquitous, you know. It was beautiful, to me to be very honest. I don't know what else to say about it, but it just felt so true.

Glen Nelson: The lighting is weird, because I mean, it's harsh lighting. No artist would select with this lighting to go in an oil painting, although obviously it's not an oil painting.

Madeline Rupard: That's what I want to say too. I don't care how anyone reads my work. That's up to them. But for me, I love this ward that I go to. It actively challenges my belief that I need to be in natural light to feel the Spirit. Because it's seriously one of the most terrible buildings I've ever gone to. There's something about it. The feng shui is not there. 

Glen Nelson: Especially the bad lighting,

Madeline Rupard: Yeah. We get these people who come up and give testimonies, and to hear what they're going through in life and just some really beautiful stories. I feel connected to this ward in a different way than I have other ones. I guess it goes to show, it's easy to be snarky when the visuals of a church aren't beautiful, but I think that there can be more underneath that surface if we're really attentive. 

Glen Nelson: Well, that's what your paintings are about. 

Madeline Rupard: Thank you. 

Glen Nelson: I'm gonna give a reading to your paintings, and you can tell me how completely far off base I am, okay? I think of your work as poetic. I don't know if you will agree, but to me, it's poetic in the way that it takes a lot of tangible information and distills it down to a pure message. It tries to present an idea or an image that's not been seen before. Another thing that your work accomplishes for me is that the image is clean enough that I can commit it to memory. Then later, like a perfect line of poetry, I say, wait a minute, that didn't say what I initially thought it did. Or rather, that didn't say only what I initially thought it did. What do you think of a reaction like mine to your work?

Madeline Rupard: I really appreciate it because I don't always think about these images as staying with someone beyond the time that they're looking at them. But I do strive with the paintings, especially the ones that are just a singular image and not part of like a comic or sequence, I want it to all be in that one image for someone to digest for a while. So, yeah, that's what I would hope they would do. So thank you. 

Glen Nelson: You know, it feels to me that a lot of work that I see online is almost meant to be disposable, which I dislike. I see something and I acknowledge it, maybe, but then I don't have an urgency to return to it, maybe even ever again. So I wonder with your work, why I am drawn back to it. There's a mystery to it, though. There's a mystery to your work, I think, that pulls me back for repeated viewing. Because I don't really love work that I immediately can read and say, okay, yeah, check. Got it. I understand everything that was intended here, or whatever. Or whatever it does, for me, it accomplished immediately. I like things to kind of spill out over a little bit of time.

Madeline Rupard: Thank you so much. That's what I would hope people would have. I think any artist would hope that would be the experience of their work. So it's really nice to hear. But I think also, honestly, my education at BYU, and Pratt, but I would say BYU really taught me to love old paintings. In fact, what got me into the Fine Arts program in the first place, because I was originally an Animation and Illustration major, was going to London. One of the teachers, Peter Everett, teaching me how to look at medieval paintings—that had a huge impact on my life. Even though I'm painting things that are very much not medieval in their subject, I'm still thinking about those Bellinis, and those Paulo Uccellos, and their composition, and the deep sense of a human touch that is imbued in them.

Glen Nelson: He has influenced a lot of people. And I should say, if you look at his paintings, they don't look like they're connected to old masters at all. But if you really start talking with them, there's a lot of math and a lot of science and a lot of ancient—

Madeline Rupard: And a lot of going to an obscure village in Italy to get the right pigment. That's what he does. Peter really believes in the alchemy and magic in objects. I actually really appreciate that. In fact, that kind of is the Mormon thing as well, I would say. 

Glen Nelson: Tell me about that. What do you think?

Madeline Rupard: Well, I read Rough Stone Rolling. Joseph Smith was very interested in objects, and I think the way he interacted with obviously the plates, the brass plates, and the different artifacts that came into The Church's history, like mummies and things like that. There was an interest and a power. Oh, look! Glen is holding a copy of Joseph Smith's Gold Plates by Richard Bushman.

Glen Nelson: This is the brand new book that just came out, which is about what you're just describing. I'm sorry, I cut you off. 

Madeline Rupard: No, no. It's more in depth, right?

Glen Nelson: It's about the plates, but also about art and the way that the plates as a cultural artifact influenced art. 

Madeline Rupard: Okay, well, I have to get a copy of that immediately, because I find that actually really interesting and kind of glossed over part of The Church now. We are much more digitally minded to parallel the world. I mean, that's a point that Richard makes in the book, in Rough Stone Rolling. There's some things that we look back on that don't really make sense to us; we have to see them through the context of, at that time The Church was working through a different kind of culture that was obsessed with objects. And now we're becoming increasingly digitized and data driven. To me, if you're an artist, you're always going to resist that a little bit because you're making things by hand. 

Glen Nelson: Yeah. Well, some are.

Madeline Rupard: That's true.

Glen Nelson: I mean, there's some pretty cool stuff that's not.

Madeline Rupard: And I'm not anti-digital. I love the internet. But I also feel like, everyone starts with pen and paper, you know?

Glen Nelson: I don't know if I've ever seen one of your paintings in person. So I'd love to ask you something that I can't get from just looking at an image on screen, you know, in the digital way. I'd love to ask you about scale. There's this weird thing about the platform of Instagram. You don't know if you're looking at a postage stamp or a mural. Nobody cites anything. No one gives you dimensions on anything. So it's really hard to determine the size of a painting. What generally would you say is the scale of your work? Or how do you even decide what size of painting that you're going to make?

Madeline Rupard: I'm of the school of thought where you can't make excuses about financial limitations and any other extraneous limitations. Just make the work however you can. And part of the way I've been making work, I live in a small but nice apartment in Ridgewood that I don't have a huge space. You're basically seeing my studio space behind me in this call.

Glen Nelson: You're not going to get any sympathy from me in my apartment.

Madeline Rupard: I love that place. Yeah, well, everyone in New York who's listening knows that's how it is here. You know, it'd be great to have a big loft in SoHo and work, but actually I find that the limitations can be motivating. When you're scrolling through Instagram, I try to include edges on things when they're an actual physical object, or to show a different angle of it. But the ones that are comics that are more meant to be scrolled through, I don't think of them as really—  It's ironic because I say I love objects, and it is important to me that they're made by hand and that they're actually painted and not on an iPad. But I feel like, at this point, unless you're mega famous, most people are going to see your work on a screen, you know. When I'm showing work in person, I want there to be that care to the object. But with the things that I'm posting on Instagram, that's where I do make concessions to the time and say, well, if more people are going to have their eyes on it in this format, then maybe object does become a little bit irrelevant.

Glen Nelson: Well, that's interesting to me. So let's say you have an idea; you've come across some tableau or something pops into your mind, and you've got some photographs that you want to use as some source material and whatever. But even that decision, how do you know what that calls for as a size?

Madeline Rupard: That's a good question. Whatever I have in my studio in terms of... [indistinct] No, no, no. I mean, sometimes things do speak to me as like, this would be great as a large image. I think it's when there feels like there's a depth to the potential landscape. I mean, I tend to work smaller. When I work big—I just finished a commission that was six-foot by eight-foot, and that was a lot for me, you know.

Glen Nelson: Is that the one that you recently posted that had a time lapse of its creation?

Madeline Rupard: Yeah, just a reel of this commission that was for a large space in someone's home. I don't work that large often. Actually, for my thesis show at BYU, I was working on large, large murals. But I think scaling down is also a way of appeasing my maximalist tendencies, which is that I see twenty things a day, I want to paint. I have literally a hundred thousand photos on my phone, and I'm constantly trying to organize them, so I know what projects are most important to me right now because of my limited time. Working small allows me to focus on a couple things at once, rather than just one large thing at once. 

Glen Nelson: I'm looking at you and in the background is part of your studio. Actually that's the image that we're going to use for the podcast illustration. It surprises me, the scale. I'm trying to figure out why it surprises me. Part of it is, I'm looking at brushstrokes and I'm looking at, again, this opaque/transparent tension. I just assumed you were making those gestures with large brushes. I assumed that's how you were getting the effect. So I can imagine some of these paintings being super successful at a large size as well as a small size. Have you ever thought about reworking one image? 

Madeline Rupard: Yeah, there are a couple of floating images of large paintings I want to make that are on the backburner for me. I think it just comes down to, there's a time and season for different projects. I think the American West tends to do well on a large surface, but also the smaller size perhaps does draw the reader in or the viewer and a little bit more, too. I try to play to the strengths of the smaller size, but I definitely don't discount that possibility soon.

Glen Nelson: Last week, I mentioned to you, I was in Philadelphia, and in addition to the Philadelphia Museum—of course you have to go there—I also went to the Barnes Foundation.

Madeline Rupard: My parents are an hour northwest of Philly, so yeah, we go there a lot. 

Glen Nelson: Well, you know, the Barnes are so interesting, because none of those works travel. I mean, they just signed a deal last week that will finally allow some of them to travel. So I've only seen them in reproduction. So seeing these paintings, some of them really quite large, I'm like, oh, okay, this is  a whole other painting. This is a whole other experience.

Madeline Rupard: I feel like I've felt that way a lot. Also in the reverse where you go and you're like, Oh, it's so small, you know? You have to reorient yourself as a body to the object a little bit.

Glen Nelson: Yeah, completely. Going back to The Season to conclude our discussion today, we commissioned you to create a new painting for this final issue. Can you tell us a little bit about it and maybe describe it? 

Madeline Rupard:   Sure. It's right behind me on my easel. So, I've been a fan of this Instagram account, @texturesofmormonism, for a while. I think there's a new movement of these Instagram accounts that are just documenting and archiving aesthetic movements; my friend and I did one on eighties malls. This girl, @texturesofmormonism, is an educator in Provo who has been archiving—it's a light-hearted attempt—just showing little snippets of the texture of the wall, or the decorations on a relief society bulletin board. I've appreciated it for a while, and I asked her when I saw this image if I could paint it one day. So when, Glen, you approached me and said, hey, I'm looking for another painting, possibly, for our last edition, I thought of this one immediately. Because it's, again, going back to the things that I value and seek after in an image. It has those nice contradictions. It's a long format painting of Jesus appearing—I think it's the Second Coming—and on His left are those who have decided not to follow Him, and on His right there are those who have followed Him. It's just a very dramatic painting, probably from the 70s or 8os; I need to trace down the artist. So this is a painting of a painting. It's against the cinder block walls, and right in front are two water fountains, those Elkay water fountains that everyone in The Church knows, you know, very familiarly. And I just think it's hilarious.

Glen Nelson: That they would hang this really large painting over two water fountains. I think there's a little garbage can that makes it feel, for me, like a mom and dad and kid. 

Madeline Rupard: Oh my gosh, like Mama Bear, Papa Bear. 

Glen Nelson: That's what it reminded me of. 

Madeline Rupard: Well, I'm not mocking this story, which is obviously very important to me, but what I'm humorously and playfully pointing at is that these are the spaces through which we walk through and you don't blink an eye, you know? I think all artists, they like to go to the top of a mountain and look down, spiritually speaking, on what's going on in societies that they can make work about it, you know. For me, sometimes I can do that just in the spaces I'm going through every day. Just take a moment and step outside and say, this is so normal to me but it's actually very strange if you look at it again. Again, the mundane and the mysterious cross paths. I find those moments where they cross paths very bewildering, but also very beautiful and exciting. Other people might look at it and be like, that's kind of boring. I don't get it. And that's OK. You know, I like the idea that there's a myriad of experiences people have with the work. 

Glen Nelson: Well, one of my reactions to it was, oh, there's this painting of a painting, this reproduced thing that is reproduced so often that no one looks at them. You know, once something has been reproduced that many times and you see it that many times, you really become kind of dead to it. I think you're doing this really interesting service to help us refresh some of these very even overly used images and make something new out of them. 

Madeline Rupard: Thank you. I mean, it's just fun to paint a painting. It's fun to paint someone else's painting. I don't know why. It just, it distills something for me. 

Glen Nelson: In your writing about this piece, and the title of it is—

Madeline Rupard: Living Waters, which I gotta say was actually Glen's idea. I took it and ran. 

Glen Nelson: There you go. I'm sure I'm gonna get residuals from the union about that one. But in writing about it, you even ask why paint an image that already exists as a photo online? Do you remember what you said to your own question and response? 

Madeline Rupard: That was two days ago, Glen. I don't know what happened this morning. 

Glen Nelson: I will read it to you. I have it here in my notes. 

Madeline Rupard: Thank you. 

Glen Nelson: “But this is precisely why I like painting. Painting is a determinedly low tech area in a high tech world. It's why I look at paintings seeing someone else's unique touch of hand and perception and thought. With the mess of colorful materials and without an undo button, I am reminded of my human limitations and my soft body that will not outlast a hand mark on a cave in France. And I do it, for the record, entirely in earnest.” That was pretty great, I have to say. 

Madeline Rupard: Thank you. 

Glen Nelson: One thing I love about you and your work is your earnestness. It's not facile, though. You're roaming around and seeking and processing ideas, and you've talked about that a little bit in our chat today. Sometimes you upend expectations and casually-held assumptions, which I think is appropriate, right? I think the tone of your work reflects that, and this series of works that are directly connected to LDS life highlight that complex creative thinking. So you know, this is kind of a little bit of a departure. I don't know if you did religious works when you were at BYU, did you? 

Madeline Rupard: No, but some people would say, I'd never paint Jesus Christ or I'd never try to do that. And I kind of want to. I have, I guess now, but I was always curious about what it would be like to try and paint Jesus. 

Glen Nelson: And you would react to it. 

Madeline Rupard: Well, we would talk, we’d have these discussions in class—like what does it mean to be a Mormon artist or an artist who's Mormon—and try and talk about like, do you want to take that head on or would you rather, in other ways, show belief in maybe a more subtle way through the work? These are conversations we'd just have in class at BYU. 

Glen Nelson: Well, it being BYU. 

Madeline Rupard: It being BYU, right. We didn't have quite the same convos at Pratt. 

Glen Nelson: Oh, exactly. Yeah. 

Madeline Rupard: But I've loved working on The Season. And thank you to Glen. You've allowed me to participate in ways that were possible for me with my chaotic art lifestyle. I think it's a great project, and I also just echo what Richard Bushman said on Faith Matters in that interview, that this is a new untapped territory in The Church, but it's a little less untapped thanks to you. So I'm excited to see how the creative arts and visual arts progress in terms of their recognizability in The Church. 

Glen Nelson: Thank you. On behalf of the Center, I thank you, Maddie, for our chat today. Where's the best place for people to learn more about you and your work? 

Madeline Rupard: Honestly, Instagram. That's where I usually update pretty weekly what I'm up to, and I'm updating my website. But I'd say go to instagram.com/madelinerupard, and you'll find links to everything else there. 

Glen Nelson: Super. Listeners, you can learn more about The Season, reread all of our back issues, and discover more about the Center by going to our website. Goodbye.