Living Waters
Madeline Rupard (American, born 1991)
Living Waters (2023)
Acrylic on paper, 8 x 8 inches
Collection of the artist
By Madeline Rupard
What is worth being painted? Art history tells us wars, kings, queens, deities, great cities, beautiful visions, terrifying dreams. But something changed in the last century or so. With the onset of “modernism,” the ordinary crept in. Vincent Van Gogh painted the tattered shoes of peasants. Gustave Courbet painted the backs of English laborers in a stone quarry. Across the continent, artists painted the dirty streets of New York and the working class on its wharfs in lieu of rose-colored European-parlor-style landscapes of the “New World.” By painting things as they really were, and not simply as an idealized fantasy, artists discovered a romance in the everyday.
I saw the reference photo to this painting on the @texturesofmormonism Instagram feed and immediately asked their permission to paint it. I don’t always know what makes me want to paint something. It must be some alchemy of pleasant composition and unusual contradictions in the subject matter. I like the banality of the water fountains in the face of such a dramatic scene of Christ’s second coming. I have long been an appreciator of @texturesofmormonism run by Tallia Feltis who archives the niche visual experience of being a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, down to relief society bulletin boards and the scratchy bristles of half-panel wallpaper common to meetinghouses around the US. I love @texturesofmormonism because, while a fun and lighthearted project, it also manages to give attention to the details of how we live our lives from day-to-day within our faith and the spaces we pass through. There is a quote by Susan Sontag from her important essay “Against Interpretation” (1966) that I think of often: “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.” Sontag calls for less escapism and a more present engagement with the world. By painting an image like this, I hope to see the humor and romance more in the day-to-day experience of Mormonism and to distill something in the small details of our existence that give them magnified meaning.
Yet, it is a strange thing to paint something in 2023. (And even stranger when a 48 megapixel photo of it already exists). Why do it in the first place? In our high tech world and the ever-widening gyre of software updates and smart phone upgrades, to slow down and render something by hand seems if not a quaint notion, then somewhat insane. But this is precisely why I like painting. Painting is a determinedly low-tech area in a high tech world. It’s why I like looking 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 handmark on a cave in France. And I do it, for the record, entirely in earnest.