Article: Bill Rutherfoord Interviewed by Darcey Steinke
From http://www.artnewyork.com/

Bill Rutherfoord, who in the spirit of full disclosure has been my friend for ten years, once drove me out at night to the Virginia countryside where his father owns a small farm. We parked and I followed him through a moonlit field into a dark barn. Bill flipped on an overhead light and I found myself in the chapel he had constructed. Fourteen stations of the cross intricately carved in wood and painted in the High Gothic style, as well as several altars, one featuring a gold-leafed depiction of the Virgin Mary, appeared before my eyes. The work represented five years of Rutherfoord’s life, and the artistry and devotion to craft overwhelmed me and made the moment almost a mystical one. Sure, I know this faith-obsessed craftsman has little in common with the delicate and chilly mainstays of the current art world but what the heck. I was moved and I’m here to tell you so.

Recently, Rutherfoord has continued his personal exploration of Biblical themes by completing a series of paintings based on Revelation and his own interaction and anxiety about the millennium. These paintings’ influences range from heavy metal jacket art to the inconography of early Christianity and they also feature narrative aspects of Rutherfoord’s own personal history. The following interview, conducted from his home in Virginia, further explicates the artist’s relationship to religion, God and the messiah-cam.

Darcey Steinke: What draws you to the Book of Revelation?

Bill Rutherfoord: I’ve lived throughout the southern United States for thirty years, gradually growing accustomed to the urgency with which folk artists, evangelical preachers and other fundamentalists address the Book of Revelation. I am interested that they conduct their lives as though God might tear open the sky at any moment, righting every wrong in a magnificent, operatic way.

DS: Do you think Revelation is influencing the way people feel about the year 2000?

BR: I keep hearing really wacky things about fundamentalist antics in the Holy Land. There is something called a messiah-cam that can be accessed via the web. I’ve never seen it, but apparently the messiah-cam is trained on the Mt. of Olives which is where Christ is supposed to turn up during the end-time. There are also reports of American cults being deported from the Holy Land by the Israeli authorities. These kinds of things seem silly and a little sad, but the people involved are absolutely earnest.

DS: Tell me about your religious background growing up and about your religious practice and beliefs now.

BR: I was raised a High Church Episcopalian. My father was an illustrator of Roman Catholic publications before finally going to seminary to become an Episcopal priest. So I guess you could say I’ve always been close to the church and the idea of making religious images. I have remained churched despite periods of doubt because I think there are insights to be gained there, though they never come quickly.

DS: Do you think mainstream American intellectuals are uninterested in religion?

BR: I can think of as many whom are interested as not. Of the intellectuals who are uninterested in religion I might speculate that their reluctance to address the subject may be a cultivated stance, which is therefore an interest, albeit a negative one. The broader culture strikes me as entirely secular, but that must be a residual effect of the separation of church and state rather than disinterest. The art world seems strangely naïve about art works with religious content. Sophomoric religious references in some contemporary art have elicited sophomoric responses from politicians and unsophisticated clergy. The art world seems satisfied with this situation, while seriously critical contemporary art works on religious subjects cause barely a tremor. I’m thinking of that marvelous Robert Gober installation with Duchampian overtones, involving the Madonna and clear references to miraculous grottoes. It got some press but I don’t think anyone understood it.

DS: What do you think is the best thing about faith?

BR: For me the best thing about faith must be the capacity it can give people to endure their lives. I like to distinguish between faith and religion. Religion is the formal, ritualized expression of faith, and it is this ritual that has yielded 2000 years of liturgical imagery, the source of much of my work. Here, I have not even taken into account the imagery of other, older belief systems outside the western canon. These too have been sources for my work.

DS: You’ve done religiously inspired work for nearly ten years now. What are your next projects?

BR: At the moment I’m working on a secular Annunciation. I think this painting, coupled with sculptural elements and other paintings, will coalesce as an installation about a woman endowed with miraculous powers. She is part-saint, part-super hero. I might call her Universal Girl. This new work is probably more political than religious, but I’m still using the 2000-year-old Western canon as a source.

Bill Rutherfoord on the paintings reproduced for this article:

These are a few thoughts on the Book of Revelation and my paintings as they pertain to the text. The first image which is called "Asia Minor Endpaper" is a compressed representation of the Prophet’s letters to the Seven Churches of Asia Minor. The seven hooded figures in that image are the seven churches. The next four paintings are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which the text identifies with specific colors. These colors are: white for the first Horseman, red for the second Horseman, black for the third Horseman and pale for the fourth Horseman. My Horsemen carry these colors and their order is:

1. Church of What’s Happening Now
2. Double Dutch
3. A Theory of Virtue
4. Lodge: The Tantric Version

The final painting is "Babylon Endpaper." It is a compressed treatment of the Whore of Babylon, and Babylon’s subsequent fall. The two endpaper paintings are slightly larger than the Four Horsemen, as endpapers in a book would be. So, in effect, I have painted the entire Book of Revelation in six images. Durer did it in fourteen.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Bill Rutherfoord was born in New York City in 1950. He spent his early youth in Mt. Kisco, New York before his family moved to Alexandria, Virginia, relocating to various parts of the south as his clergyman father was assigned new posts every few years. Rutherfoord studied at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he received a B.F.A., and then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received his M.F.A. His work is in numerous private collections throughout the country. He is also represented at the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia.

Rutherfoord's first New York exhibition, a 1984 group show called "Dolls and Other Effigies," at New Math Gallery in the East Village, included Rodney Allen Greenblatt, Keiko Bonk, Craig Coleman and others. In 1998, works by Rutherfoord, Andre Serrano, Raymond Pettibone, The Rev. Ethan Akers and others were gathered in an exhibition entitled "Transfiguration" at Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, New York, curated by the novelist Darcey Steinke. A selection of Rutherfoord's apocalyptic works featured prominently in 1999's "Spirit and Flesh," curated by Mark Scala at the Art Museum of Western Virginia, with an exhibition essay by Eleanor Heartney. "Thinking with Blood" -- 'Conflict and Culture in the American South,' curated by Craig Bunting included Rutherfoord's Endpaper paintings, along with works by William Eggleston, Robert Colescott, William Christenberry and others. The show traveled the U.S. from January 2003 through August 2004, opening at the Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia and closing at Dorsky Gallery, New York. Continuing to paint and exhibit, Rutherfoord lives in Roanoke, Virginia with his wife, the painter Beth Shively.