After Burton Rupp returned home from serving stateside in the military during World War II, the family spent the next several years moving from Utah to Idaho to Indiana in search of work. Kent attended eight grammer schools during this time; he was always the new kid. These were very solitary years for Kent, and they deepened his immersion into art and music. Eventurally the family moved to Alameda, California, where he attended Alameda High school for four years, graduating in 1955. He continued drawing and playing piano throughout these years. Money was always tight. To buy art supplies and to escape the constraints of his family, Kent took part-time jobs, from teaching piano and delivering newspapers to working in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Ms. Dorothy Layton, his high school art teacher and a beloved mentor, gathered his artwork into a portfolio, presented it to him, encouraged him to apply to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (CCAC), and helped him with his application. That same year, 1955 he was awarded a CCAC scholarship and his formal art education began.
During the period from 1955 to 1960, the San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley art scene was flourishing. Kent was introduced to emerging painters and took classes form Richard Diebenkorn. While at CCAC, he socialized with prominent figurative artists, including Diebenkorn, Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Manual Neri. The San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, and CCAC were hotbeds of creativity and both faculty and students partied hard in those days, often together. His friend Jon Sagen – a trombone player and an artist – was good friends with the artists and musicians at these institutions. Bischoff and Park formed Studio 13, an informal Dixieland jazz band, Jon became a member, and they played at art openings and parties. Kent and Park had similar childhoods, with isolation and a love of both piano and art. Park and Jon encouraged Kent to join the band, which he did, part time. He was the only student; other members of Studio 13 were either faculty or in other professions. When Park became ill in the late 1950s, Kent was asked to play piano for his friend, which he did during Park's final months. Kent was now fully immersed in the heart of the Beat Generation.
"You can say one thing about Rupp's art: No one has a ring through his nose," Richard Diebenkorn said to Jon Sagen as they strolled through the last student show before Kent graduated. In one of our final conversations, at his bedside in the hospital, Kent said, "As a 21-year-old, I was bothered by that comment, but now, after all these years, I see it as a great compliment."
Kent's painting style diverged from his contemporaries. When I asked him about this period, he said that he had felt compelled to paint a little tighter and a little more slowly. His paintings in those early days show the influence of his contemporaries, but he was moving in a different direction. Kent produced a large body of figurative paintings, both clothed and nude, many with antiestablishment elements loaded with symbolism. Even his later abstract canvases mirror his deep meditative relationship with his art, reflected in brushstrokes that were never rushed; he took his time. His subject matter was at times very sensual, at times very political, and at times both. He was never a mimic; he was unique, ever true to himself and his own vision.
Kent experienced a brief disruption in his career when was drafted at age 22. He spent two years at Ford Ord, on the Monterey Peninsula, where he characteristically refused an opportunity to attend officer's school. When the Army learned he could draw and play both piano and organ, he was assigned to the Chaplain Corps, where he spent most of his time playing classical favorites for the officers. He also painted portraits of many officers' wives and children. He understood the he lucked out getting this duty.
Kent met Sally, his first wife, during his Army years. After his discharge, they lived in San Francisco's North Beach, moved to Tiburon briefly, and eventually built their own place in Forest Knolls, in west Marin County. He was actively painting at the time. He had solo shows and his paintings sold well from 1966 through the mid 1970s, when he was represented by the Braunstein Quay Gallery.
At the same time, Kent began applying to Bay Area colleges and eventually chose Mills College in Oakland, which gave him a full scholarship and provided a teaching assistant. While working on his MFA, he was named a Trefethan Fellow, awarded for outstanding achievement as a graduate student. Upon graduation, he was immediately hired as a charter member of the art department of the newly formed College of Alameda. In 1975, he was lured away from his professorship and hired to develop an art program and as a professor at the College of Marin's new Indian Valley Campus in Novato. Students lined up to take his classes, waiting patiently on long waiting lists, hoping to get an opportunity to work with this master of drawing and painting the human figure. His characteristically unvarnished advice to students was to "just paint more."
During this period, Kent's marriage ended and he had to sell his Forest Knolls home. When, near the end of his life, I asked him about this, he said "It was just a very hard time, and I became disillusioned with the constant pressure to producing 'art to sell'." Kent moved into a warehouse complex in Novato, where many other artists lived, and continued to create large and small paintings and drawings. He relieved his stress on his small sailboat, both sailing and racing on the San Francisco Bay. In the summer of 1978, he sailed solo to Hawaii and back, writing in his travel log that he loved being alone and was considering quitting his teaching job, taking time away from everything, and sailing around the world.
Instead Kent returned to class in the fall of 1978 and met me. I was divorcing my first husband after less than two years of marriage and neither Kent nor I were looking for or expecting to find a partner. He told me he fell in love with me when he saw my artwork and became curious about who I was and where I had come from. I wanted nothing to do with any man at that point, but magnets tend not to separate and our connection was and remains magnetic. We fell in love first with each other's art and then with our souls.
Kent and I were married in 1981 and, for both of us, the moment changed our lives. We had one blissful year and then, in 1982, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. The surgery and the recovery period were debilitating, but provided a time for great introspection. During this decade, he produced many of his Gothic artworks, beautiful surrealistic drawings and paintings interlaced with images of nature. We moved to Sonoma County in 1984, bought an old farmhouse in a crumbling apple orchard in west Sebastopol, built a studio for Kent adjacent to the little house, and slowly remodeled and landscaped it all into what he called his sanctuary. He continued to paint and draw; he had several solo shows and participated in group shows, as well.
By early 1990s, I was traveling a great deal for my design business, leaving Kent time to paint continuously. He once again began changing his direction, producing large canvases of people in Sonoma County. These "Sonoma Figurative" paintings were shown in several exhibitions and are some of my favorite paintings. They are large, saturated with color, with loose and expressive brushstrokes. He drew charcoal studies and sketches and combined several individual studies into one painting. After 35 years, he finally retired from Indian Valley College in 2004. In 2005 he was named "Marin County Artist of the Year" and given a show at the Marin Civic Center. The centerpiece of the show was a large painting, "Red Horse," part of the "Sonoma Figurative" series, along with many of his other figurative drawings and paintings.
In 2006, Kent was included in a group show at the John Natoulas Center for the Arts at the University of California, Davis. Natsoulas curated the show and produced the accompanying catalog, Bay Area Figurative Paintings – Then and Now. The exhibition, on view from March 1 through March 26, 2006, included works by Elmer Bischoff, Manual Neri, Nathan Olivera, David Park, and Kent, along with many others.
Kent never stopped producing art. He painted almost daily and was a voracious reader of newspapers, magazines, periodicals, and books. After developing osteoarthritis in his 40s, he had stopped playing the piano but still listened to classical music almost constantly. A series of health challenges in his seventies and eighties did not stop him from creating. Around 2010, Kent shifted from painting the figure to exploring abstraction, which filled his final decade. This work is quite a departure from the figurative work that he had always been known for. His imagination soared and he both explored and recorded it in his art. As life moved, Kent moved with it. In April 2021, before either of us knew he would be hospitalized in two months, he said, "I am painting what I see now. It's the same as when I started; it's just that I see something different now." He remained intellectually curious and was mesmerized by the universe, quantum physics, fractals, string theory, and the complexity of both classical music and nature. His facination is evident in his paintings.
In 2016, he began the first of the sixteen collages that eventually became "The Displaced." Neither of us had any idea that he would feel compelled to pick up new canvases, starting one collage after another. He was an activist all his life and was deeply mystified by what he called the "human destructive cycle." Kent also felt a deep emotional connection with those who were not as fortunate as he. He was viscerally affected by newspaper images that were bombarding him daily. All of the thousands of images, including the religious and cultural iconography, in these collages came directly from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications that came into his purview. He sought none of them but was instead drawn into the images that bombarded us all, constantly. At the time of his death, he had been working on two additional collages; they will remain unseen.
Watching Kent paint was like watching someone hypnotized by the canvas. Although he was very much part of the figurative movement, his paintings are stylistically unique and reveal a broad range of influences. He was private and shied away from publicity. He told me he painted because it made him feel alive and that he saw things that he didn't care to verbalize, even though he was a lover of essays, often clipping articles that he praised for using an economy of words to express so much. He worked on several canvases, all different, at the same time. It's as though he was conducting his own symphony, each painting sounding a different note and all coming together in melodic harmony.
The book, The Last Decade, R. Kent Rupp, is currently underway and will be published in the fall of 2024. It showcases Kent's work from 2010 until his passing in 2021. Several of his canvases were on easels when he went into the hospital. While he was there, I brought photos and videos of his studio and of his garden so he could see his sancturary. Sometimes, he would hit pause and enlarge some of the unfinished paintings to examine them. After 43 years together, it was obvious to me that he was composing in his head what he wanted to add when he got back to his studio. Those paintings remain exactly where he left them.
Our story begins in 1978 when Kent was 41; everything I know about his life before we met came from him and from my own explorations during our years together. And so I begin at our beginning. I was 25 and we fell madly in love. Kent was mid-career, burned out, and searching for a new direction; I was searching for a way to make art and had not yet found my footing. He was a brilliant man who read, painted, luxuriated in Mozart and Beethoven, and taught art throughout his life. He was a deeply humble and curious soul, a sensualist, and an expressive artist. He was empathic towards others and had both a great wit and a talent for telling stories. He and I stayed together through countless personal crises, which strengthened both of us. We remained in love, working and encouraging each other in every direction, never envious of each other's talents and successes. I remain in awe of his creativity.
Kent was born Feb. 8, 1937, in Salt Lake City, Utah. His birth certificate identifies him as Richard Kent Williams, with his biological father's surname. His mother divorced Howard Williams in 1939 and soon married Burton Rupp. They changed Kent's last name to Rupp but never formally updated his birth record nor informed Kent of his true heritage until he was in his thirties. He signed his artowrk as "Rupp" and sometimes added "Kent" and the date. Years later, during particularly profound summer of 1978 for Kent, his biological father passed away, never having reconnected with the adult son he had not seen since Kent was a toddler. Kent did not learn of his death until 2012, when he was in his 70s.
Kent's early years, until age 7, were mostly spent at his Aunt Madge's home in Ogden, Utah. She was prominent in social circles and exposed him to art and music. She nurtured his creativity, encouraging him to read music and to learn the classics on her grand piano. His musical talent blossomed during these formative years, as did his natural talent for drawing especially the human figure. Anut Madge knew that his biological father was a professional musician, a trumpet player, and that he came from a long line of gifted musicians. His entire maternal family knew this history yet never told him, a secrecy, a dismissiveness, that haunted Kent until his death.