Soapbox Artist: Paul Rucker

Soapbox Artist is a new, monthly online-only column that invites local creative types (who you don't normally hear from in the written medium) to sound off about...whatever they want.

Inaugural contributor: Paul Rucker

Art and Personal Experience

This recent Halloween night, when Officer Timothy Brenton was killed, brought back memories of my childhood. I watched several police cars drive up Yesler Avenue as I drove home.

Since I was a young child, my obsessive compulsive relationship to numbers has caused me to start counting after any kind of repetition passed the number four. Driving up Yesler that night, after I got to seven, I knew someone had been shot; after I passed eleven, I knew a cop was down. After I arrived home, I heard many more patrol cars go by. I stopped counting after twenty-two.

When I was around age twelve, I witnessed a dozen police cars zoom down my residential street. An officer was down. He was not down on the ground because of a bullet or punch. He went down from a heart attack while delivering a summons. The show of support was amazing.

As a young man growing up on the South side of Anderson, South Carolina, I would occasionally hear gun shots at night.  One Sunday morning on the way to church, I got into the car with my family and noticed a strange circle on the front windshield. When I got older, I realized it was a bullet hole. I noticed later there was also a bullet hole on my bedroom window. At that point I realized bullets don't have steering wheels.

Later, when I would visit from college, my mom would have newspapers saved for me. She would keep any article that had anything to do with classmates. Actually, most of the articles had to do with things such as crimes committed by friends or classmates. From murder, rape, burglary and drug trafficking— she wanted me to see. I'm not sure if it was a warning of what "could" happen. 

For a while, I was used to hearing about my former peers falling one at a time into nefarious activity, but when I heard that four of my old classmates were involved in a murder in which they netted $67, I started to wonder about why my fate was different. Since then, one of the young men has been executed through lethal injection; one is on death row; another received thirty-five years but is now out; the driver received a shorter sentence because he was not part of the shooting. Unfortunately, he ended up back in prison on another charge, where he later died.

I went to grade school with these young men. We played basketball and baseball together. We learned math and reading. For whatever reason, I went to college and their lives went in completely different directions.

Creating art from personal experience is liberating for artists. Whether the artist creates from anger, joy, guilt, pain from personal loss, or physical pain, autobiographical art can channel so much through the creation of works that hopefully will help others understand other points of view.

A great example of this is the current show at the Wing Luke Museum entitled Yellow Terror: The Collections and Paintings of Roger Shimomura. Roger Shimomura' s art takes on issues of his ethnic identity as a third-generation Japanese American. I recommend that you see this show; and go back and see it again.

Different Citizens. Roger Shimomura, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 45".

Courtesy of the artist.

Yellow Terror: The Collections and Paintings of Roger Shimomura is on display at Wing Luke Asian Museum through April 18, 2010.

Paul Rucker is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist (cellist-bassist-composer-visual artist-creator of interactive sound/video installations). He has released two critically acclaimed CDs of his compositions, and he composes new music presented in a way that allows the viewer-listener the opportunity to interact with the work (participants can trigger sounds with the wave of a hand, touch of a finger, or press of a button). To read more about him and his work, visit his website.