Ernest Ruckle (May 1, 1940 - May 2018) was an American

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...

noted for his elaborately structured paintings.

Life and work

He was born in Neptune, New Jersey, US. Ruckle attended

elementary school A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ed ...

s in

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

and

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

, and

high school A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper seconda ...

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

. At

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

, he at first majored in

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

, but later switched to

English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. ''The Encyclopaedia Britannica'' defines E ...

and specialized in literary criticism. His most influential teachers were

Francis Fergusson Francis Fergusson (1904–1986) was a Harvard and Oxford-educated teacher and critic, a theorist of drama and mythology who wrote ''The Idea of a Theater'', (Princeton, 1949) arguably the best and most influential book about drama written by an Am ...

and

Paul Fussell Paul Fussell Jr. (22 March 1924 – 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentar ...

. After getting his degree, he became a professional artist in 1963. He soon started to produce paintings in formal perspective with huge crowds of people and parodies of complex machinery. His first one-man show was at the Studio Gallery Workshop in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

in 1966. (His tenth New York one-man show was in 2005 at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery.) Between 1966 and 1969, Ruckle developed an original flat style influenced by Cubism and Futurism with an unusual perspective system, perhaps influenced by Persian miniatures. Beginning around 1975 he began to use more than one style in a work and to use variation in style as a structural device. He died in May 2018 in Waterford,

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

.Ernest Ruckle.com
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Notable works

*

' (1965) is an early example of Ruckle's work using conventional perspective. *

' (1966) is an early experiment with a flat style. *

' (1975) is a triptych using a different style in each panel. *

' (1983) is the first of a series of large triptychs. It's a return to conventional perspective. *

' (1998) gradually changes in style from left to right, mirroring the change in action.

References

External links

Ernest Ruckle's website
contains hundreds of direct scans of the

triptych A triptych ( ; from the Greek language, Greek adjective ''τρίπτυχον'' "''triptukhon''" ("three-fold"), from ''tri'', i.e., "three" and ''ptysso'', i.e., "to fold" or ''ptyx'', i.e., "fold") is a work of art (usually a panel painting) t ...

that can be printed and assembled into a large reproduction. 1940 births 2018 deaths 20th-century American painters American male painters Rutgers University alumni 20th-century American male artists {{US-painter-1940s-stub