I paint contemporary impressionist landscapes, portraits, and figurative works.
Contact budrudesill@gmail.com for more information and sales.
MY BIOGRAPHY
Condensing the story of my life is far more
daunting than writing a novel, for the story of my life is a saga. I have
pursued so many options, been so many places, and earned my living doing so
many things. The sum total of events and accomplishments of my life, plus the
stories I’ve heard over the years told by others is the food for the creation
of the characters and events that fill my literary works and inspire my
paintings.
D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, was on
June 6, 1944. My D-Day, the day I was delivered into this world, was four days
later, June 10, 1944. My father was training troops in southern California. I
was born in Portland, Oregon where my father’s parents lived.
Shortly after my birth, he was discharged. He
lived to hunt and fish, and wanted to settle in a place where the hunting and
fishing was exceptional. He chose the town of Tulelake in extreme northern
California, like four miles from the Oregon border, to start a hardware and
sporting goods store. And that’s where I grew up.
Tulelake, the town, was built on reclaimed swamp
land, otherwise known as Tule Lake. Most of the land that was reclaimed from
the lake for farming was allocated to World War I and World War II veterans.
They grew potatoes, wheat, brew barley, onions, alfalfa, and some other crops.
The potatoes and onions were irrigated with water from an elaborate irrigation
system created by the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation. For the farmers and their
laborers that meant using siphon tubes made of aluminum or plastic to siphon
water from irrigation ditches into the furrows between the lines of potato or
onion plants. Most of my summers from the time I was twelve years old until I
started collage were spent working at that or bucking hay.
My mother’s grand uncle, Jack Wilkinson Smith, was
arguably the father of the California Plein Air Impressionist movement. The
home I was raised in had several of his paintings, one of Frank Tenny Johnson’s,
one of Katherine Leighton’s, and one of William McDermott’s hanging on our
walls. I was strongly influenced by these works and by the time I was eight I
wanted to become an artist and I was sure I had the talent for it. However, my
father considered painting pictures to be sissy stuff. He pressured me into
taking engineering in college and when I failed at the mathematical parts of
that discipline, I switched to geology, a discipline that I had a rare talent
for.
I paid my own way through college by working at
farm labor, ranch labor, timber scaling, housing construction, and some other
things. My M.S. in geology got me to Saudi Arabia and because of that I got to
see parts of Europe. Subsequently I’ve visited Europe several times with my
wife. My art has been greatly influenced by those experiences. Otherwise, my
profession as a geologist didn’t pay for the cost of the education.
Life for me has not been the pursuit of a dream.
It has been more like a dream composed of choices, opportunities, luck—good and
bad—romance, and adventure. For me, those are the components of good stories
and art. I never have to look far to find the material to spin a yarn or paint
a picture.
I became interested in fashion photograph images
in 2002. Contemporary figurative paintings seemed to me to be invariably devoid
of any emotion. I found emotion in fashion photography dating back to the early
60s. Fashion photography became an art form that was conceived to create
desire—desire in women to look like the beautiful fashion models, to wear the
kind of clothing they wore, to use the hair and makeup products, and add the
accessories the models showed off. I also realized the fashion industry was a
warped, distorted, fantasy world. I found subject matter to create figurative
paintings that conveyed complex emotions and concepts.
After finishing several of these distorted
paintings of fashion models, they began to tell me their stories, and I wrote
them down. The vignettes became a rudimentary magazine I called Cutter’s Bizaar. Early in 2011 I began
the push to organize the vignettes into a cogent story—a novel tied together by
an unlikely character, a fashion photographer, Frank Cutter, who was raised on
a primitive ranch in Wyoming.
I had written a couple of novels by that time that
weren’t all that good and I had been painting seriously since I was 15 and
traded skiing lessons for watercolor lessons from a grammar school
teacher/artist. However, I couldn’t pursue art very seriously until I was
almost 30. The paintings I started based on fashion photography drove me to
paint more and better. I went back to my original love of landscapes inspired
by Jack and they got better when I switched to acrylics but that’s a long
story.
I paint now mostly with acrylics and sometimes
with watercolors but I have a late-forming essential tremor that prevents me
from painting on an easel and I sold my oils. And then I went back to
watercolors and then acrylics on a drafting board.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to paint
but our walls are full and I have paintings stored here and there. It’s time to
work on selling some of them.