In her paintings of shimmering roadways, Utah-based artist Madeline Rupard reaches for the eternal.
Orem, Utah | madelinerupard.com | @madelinerupard
Like a traveler, light has a source and a direction. In Madeline Rupard’s oil and acrylic paintings, challenging lighting—waning sun angled over the interstate or expanding at dawn across Nebraska’s plains—is captured in its full drama. Though these images are held still on panels as much as six feet in length, viewers nevertheless connect with the sensation that, again, like the traveler, the light is “always passing through,” a phrase Rupard uses to describe her own trajectory bouncing around the country.
“My work is about cataloguing light, surfaces, and skies,” Rupard explains in her artist statement. Many of her paintings explore “the blue we see in atmospheric distance.” This phenomenon—created by the scattering and absorption of light in the air between you and the object you’re gazing at—means faraway things shift toward the color of the sky, giving them a hazy, blue veil.
In paintings like I-15 Reverie (2025), the Wasatch mountain range is stacked against fading skies, a few transient clouds blooming above the horizon line. Here, Rupard devotes as much of the picture plane to the sky as to the road, which stretches toward the vanishing point. This emphasis on distance and the boundlessness of the atmosphere is contrasted by the road, which has a definite edge—even if, romantically, we imagine it could go on forever. The sky offers the eternal. The road, like the light and the traveler on it, started somewhere and is going somewhere; they each make their narrow way through limitless space.
“Each painting,” Rupard writes, “marks a poignant moment of reflection that I experienced in transit.” When in transit, our thinking borrows from our surroundings. Here, Rupard conjures “a sense of wonder at the modern world,” wherein each wooden panel pins a short-lived moment to a timeless, boundless wash of sky.
