Dear England,

You have been difficult, but you have also been a dream.

(P.S. Thanks for introducing me to the Italian Gothics.)

Sincerely,
-Maddy Rupard

Quelques Drawing Projects of Late

Pt I.

For me there should be a saying, "You can't make something from everything." There are so many things that I have checked off in my head as awesome, and so I try to mix them all together in my work, and then it often turns out feeling a bit like a funfetti cake or something. What started as the Snow Queen (and may yet still be the theme) has been contaminated by too many dreams, cool paintings I have seen in museums, sisters, songs, etcetera. I just do not know how to edit things out and form it into something tangible, so I just keep taping things to my wall.

Pt II.

I was walking across the bridge to the Westminster tube station on a sweaty Saturday, when I decided to look up. Thank goodness, for I beheld and fell instantly in love with this charioted woman. Here is Queen Boudicca (Bo-de-see-a), who finds herself fiercely memorialized in dark marble, at a good 20 foot height above the crowd that is generally always surrounding this touristy area. 

With her two daughters and her manic horses she is forever stuck in the moments before she charges up the path to Parliament to demand the freedom of her Celtic people. She was victorious this time, but she and her daughters were eventually captured and  killed by Roman soldiers in 61 A.D. She had nothing to do with my studio project and yet had been on my mind for a few weeks. I came back to Westminster one afternoon and stared at her for about three hours, and could've easily done it for a few dozen more. 

Two Saturday Quickies.

Two weekend paintings based off a Tudor portrait of Katherine Parr and Waterhouse's Circe. This is part of a collaboration with Madeline Mcneil and Becca Zabbawa. Something else is yet to be added to them. It felt nice to work loose and fast for once.

Sneedronningen Scraps.

More to come soon. Sketches and WIP for the "Sneedronningen" project or better known as the "Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen, an old Danish story that is full of so many interesting images that I want to try my hand at.  This is a few tries of a certain pose for my Gerda character. I am in London for the next few months and the internet situation here in the BYU Centre is laughable, so if things are a bit sparse, that's why. Thanks to anyone who stops by and just takes time to look. London is "so diverting", but hopefully I'll have a good series to post by the time Christmas comes around.

Stories and women.

The Unfox.

A little doodle inspired by some recent current events.

Colleen Image Ideas

"Well they took me in
And shod my feet and taught me prayers for chastity,
And said my name would be Colleen
and that I was blessed among all women to have forgotten everything."

Quelque chose de vieux, quelque chose de nouveau.

Salut, och hejsan, and hello! I'm posting a little sketch of that particular project in the which I am trying to draw a convincing sleeping woman. This is a study of Flaming June by Lord Frederic Leighton.

Baby Hummingbird

Baby Hummingbird from madeline rupard on Vimeo.

Symbiotic Relationship

Your Wild Brain

Spicy Thaiger

A little design project. Dedicated to Tapatio flavored Doritos.

Au Revoir, Georgia.

This morning marks the first after the rush and stress of moving into our house in St. George. I am sitting in my newly furnished room, listening to Brian Eno's Music for Airports part I. There is this quiet sadness that I suddenly feel about leaving Georgia--but really the East Coast, my home, the Tamarack forest, the colonial history, the many places that I have etched into my mind as real beauty--Bingham swamp, deep in Georgia where we could hear the alligators' mating calls, or when we went to Harper's Ferry one autumn afternoon after church, or just the view of the tall woods from our house in Silver Spring.

I really didn't feel sad about moving until now. I haven't in general. I think that geography is incredibly important and that there's some real feelings that we can associate to the directions North, East, South, and West. The North is my goal, and always will be. The South, as we left it, felt like a stuck place to me. It felt hot, tired, maybe even angry. It was the title character from Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, holding onto the corpse of old ideas, staying in the same decaying room until death. I know it's a bit dramatic, but I can't emphasize this feeling enough. I literally felt as if a burden had been lifted as we left the state line of Georgia....then I felt it again as we left Kentucky and entered Georgia again for a couple of minutes due to the way the highway runs through the state. Then once more, and finally it was gone. I don't intend to insult the South, because it is in many ways a very nice place to live, this is just how I feel currently.

The West is new, it is fresh, it is, in a way, the modern art of geography. It is starkly beautiful, misunderstood and uncomfortable at times, exhilarating at others. For me, it is a training ground for however long it needs to be--years or decades. St. George is a particularly happy, sunshiney city, but I feel towards it the way I feel towards the utopian small town in Big Fish that Edward Bloom finds in the middle of the forest, early in his journey and decides to leave to continue on with the adventure of life and jumping spiders. On a related note, whenever I move somewhere, I look up the spiders of the area simply because they are the worst and it turns out there's only one kind of deadly spider in St. George as opposed to the millions in Georgia. So that's another good thing. By the way it's called a Desert recluse and unlike the Brown Recluse, it's Eastern counterpart, it doesn't have a violin shape on it's head. You can recognize it by it's similar body shape and the six eyes it has on it's head, instead of the normal spider's amount of eight eyes. 

Maya & the Drewpster, Sketches of

, 

Concert Poster, Shmoncert Shmoster

and leave the birds all the trimmings.

Late late night sketching.

J Dub

 

A little waterhouse from last weekend

Chello.

 

I am not the best blogger this month--I'm sorry! I appreciate your views and comments anyways. In all honesty, I have not made the time out of stress from many different areas of life. But, hey, I got into the Bachelor of Fine Arts Illustration Program here at BYU! So...here are some 30 second figure drawings I dug up recently for the review process. I think they're from last semester. I will put some final projects up by the end of the week, at which point I will probably be in Georgia for the last time in a long time.

But spring is here! This season means that my family will be making a much awaited move to St. George, Utah: a pleasant Southwestern town full of red rock and beautiful sunsets.We're pretty excited. Spring also means more morning walks, even more Joanna Newsom, and new goals, including a nice little makeover of my blog, still forthcoming. I'm testing out this title at the moment. I know what you're thinking, "But, Maddy, you're not Russian! Nor can you claim to have any ties to Russian culture or language!" And rightly said, I am but a Hungarian/Swedish mix, but I just like the idea of this strange, distant land. It's literature, landscape, weather, and general air of dismay has risen as this huge interest to me, for reasons I am still unaware. I read this certain line "under the Russian sky" in Pushkin's work lately and I liked it. I might bag it, but for now it's kind of working for me.

Un cerf.

I'm going to paint this.

Sketchbook Part 2

The idea of illustrating Russian literature is what's getting me excited lately.

Sketchbook Part 1

Just finished my black sketchbook.

Saturday Morning

Un petit exercice.

Sorry for taking forever to post something new. I've been avoiding the internet like the plague, due to its ability to keep me from doing productive things. I've even been slacking on tumblr posts, which are the easiest to make.

So, this was a class exercise in 2D Design that I think turned out kind of cool. I'll be posting a bigger illustration project on here dans quelques jours!

New Painting

Tableau.

An Idea.