Glencairn Museum News | Number 2, 2024
Temptation of Jesus. Jesus, identified by the halo of light, kneels in a natural setting with arms extended. To the left, a snake coils behind a rock, its head moving toward Jesus and its tongue out. On the right, a winged angel reaches toward Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe how Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness and tempted by the devil for forty days.
Figure 1: American artist Rudolph “Rudy” Bostic (1941–2021).
Can you share some details about Rudy Bostic’s background and upbringing that may have influenced his artistic journey?
Growing up after World War II in the African American community of Savannah, Georgia, Bostic had few opportunities to develop his artistic talents. His widowed mother had to support four children on a hairdresser’s salary. He owned few toys and taught himself how to draw. His first real encouragement to make art came from his local church. Bostic’s uncle, the pastor of the Second African Baptist Church on Greene Square, asked Rudy and his younger brother, Lewis, to make religious pictures for his congregation. These early paintings of Bible stories confirmed Bostic’s lifelong commitment to making art on religious themes.
Bostic’s choice of materials, particularly recycled cardboard and house paint, is unusual. Could you elaborate on how he came to use these materials?
Bostic was working at the Derst Baking Company in Savannah, Georgia, when he discovered a readily available (and free!) material for making art in all the discarded boxes and barrels used to ship flour and sugar. He thought the smooth cardboard panels would be ideal boards to paint on with the odds and ends of house paint he had collected at home. Bostic used recycled boxes as his primary material for painting all his career. He preferred their solid, flat surfaces to what he called “springy” stretched canvases.
Figure 2: This photograph of the back of Temptation of Jesus (see lead photo above) shows how Bostic painted on recycled cardboard. He crafted his cardboard canvases from discarded boxes like those he found at the Derst Baking Company in Savannah, Georgia, where he once worked. According to Bostic, “The Bible had story after story to tell. I just had to pick what to paint them on. I ran my hand against these big old cardboard sheets. They were so smooth. This was what I wanted.”
Figure 3: Abraham and Isaac. This painting portrays one of the stories about the life of Abraham in the Book of Genesis. God told Abraham to take his only son, Isaac, to a mountain and sacrifice him. Here, Abraham holds a knife over Isaac, who lies on an altar of wood. However, an angel, who appears in the air above Abraham, was sent by God to stop Abraham from harming Isaac. Abraham found a ram in a nearby thicket, which he sacrificed instead.
Bostic’s use of recycled cardboard here is striking. The canvas is a round lid, probably from a flour or sugar barrel; its raised rim serves as a frame.
Bostic’s paintings show a strong contrast between light and dark passages, reminiscent of chiaroscuro. What artistic influences have contributed to his distinctive style?
Bostic was a self-taught artist and he kept art books and clippings of his favorite images. He greatly admired the paintings of Rembrandt, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. From his home study of these Old Masters, Bostic developed his own style of chiaroscuro painting with contrasting sections of light and dark colors edged in black. He was always open to a wide range of influences. Later in life, he experimented with a form of pointillism, using decorative passages of shimmering dots. You can see this effect in his painting in the exhibition of Last Supper (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Last Supper. The Last Supper is the final meal that Jesus ate with his twelve disciples before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. In this painting, Bostic draws inspiration from the composition of the famous Renaissance masterpiece, The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Jesus and his disciples are gathered along one side of a long table draped with a white cloth. The Gospels recount how, during this meal, Jesus gave bread and wine to his disciples, saying that the bread was his body and the wine his blood. This act is commemorated in the Christian sacrament of Communion or Eucharist.
Bostic’s use of miniature paintings to frame his central images is intriguing. How important is this technique in his work?
Almost all the paintings in the exhibition are “framed” in some way. It might be simple black outlines with brightly colored curving lines or more elaborate cut-outs with miniature paintings. Bostic may have used these framing devices to make up for the lack of straight edges on the rough-cut cardboard panels and to square up his central images. Bostic often painted sitting on his bed watching television and the inspiration for these pictures within pictures were the close-ups, split-screen effects and other editing tricks he saw on TV. These visual vignettes may add to our understanding of his biblical illustrations, as we see in his painting, Lake of Fire/Angels Thrown from Heaven (Figure 5), with small scale scenes of desert landscapes, falling figures, and crosses, or serve a general decorative function like his many small images of fruit plates and table settings, suggesting the abundance of God.
Figure 5: Lake of Fire/Angels Thrown from Heaven. This painting depicts a scene from the Book of Revelation in which the dead are judged according to what they had done in their lives. Anyone not recorded in the book of life was thrown into a lake of fire. Here, a series of figures cascade down into a deep lake. At the bottom of the lake, the figures encounter a red devil. The frame is made from a separate piece of cardboard. It shows crosses and elements from the central image, mostly barren landscapes and falling human beings.
What is Bostic’s place within the broader context of outsider art or African American art? What distinguishes his work from that of other artists in these categories?
Bostic’s cardboard panel pictures fit within an African American tradition of “testimony art,” meant to share Black historical experiences and religious beliefs in a visual way. Themes from Genesis to the Book of Revelation appear in multiple variations in his body of work, as we see in this exhibition, which begins with the Creation of Adam (Figure 6) and ends with the Lake of Fire/Angels Thrown from Heaven (Figure 5). Bostic’s use of inexpensive, recycled materials links him to other self-taught Southern artists like Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who painted with mud and sand on plywood. What sets him apart is his use of bold, black outlining and vibrant, contrasting colors, bringing to mind stained glass, which draws us into the biblical narratives he depicts.
Figure 6: Creation of Adam. This painting portrays Eden, the abundant garden created by God described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In the painting, God’s hand reaches down from the right to create Adam, the first human being, who appears in the center. Here, Bostic alludes to the famous image from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel of the hands of God and Adam extending toward each other.
What paintings in the exhibition are you particularly drawn to?
I’m intrigued by Bostic’s paintings of angels. He firmly believed heavenly beings worked behind the scenes to bring about good in the world, and they appear in more than half of the cardboard panels in this exhibition. My two favorites are his brilliantly colored images of Noah with the Animals and Angels (Figure 7) and Nativity with Angel (Figure 8). They were probably made at about the same time using turquoise, purple, and green from the same paint sample pots. When these samplers ran out, Bostic simply changed his palette to work in a different “color period” with whatever new paints he found.
Figure 7: Noah with the Animals and Angels. In the center of this painting, Noah stands surrounded by animals. There is no sign of the ark or a flood. Bostic has painted an especially elaborate frame for this painting. It features various animals in separate rectangles at the top and bottom, and large angels to the left and right. Bostic explained his interest in angels in this way: “I love angels. I believe angels are behind most of what happens on this earth, working for the forces of light. There are guardian angels and angels who oversee the weather. God has given each angel a specific job to do.”
Figure 8: Nativity with Angel. A winged angel stands above Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, who is lying in a manger. Animals gather around on either side. Sometimes, Bostic added a separate cardboard frame to his painting, as he did here. This frame is painted with the heads of angels, humans, and animals from the central scene, along with a depiction of Jesus in a manger, crosses, vessels, fruit, and a book (likely the Bible).
Figure 9: Adam and Eve Naming the Animals. In the Book of Genesis, God brings all animals to Adam to be named. In this painting, Adam, seated in the center, is surrounded by a wide variety of animals, including a giraffe and elephant behind him and a squirrel in front of him. Adam looks at Eve, the first woman, who holds a bouquet of flowers. An angel hovers above in the upper left corner. Angels held special meaning for Bostic, who featured them frequently in his art.
Figure 10: Moses at the Rock. In the Bible, Moses rescued the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt and led them through the Sinai wilderness toward the land that God had promised them. In this painting, Moses stands beside a pool of water flowing from a rock. The Book of Numbers describes how, during their time in the wilderness, the people ran out of water and turned against Moses. God instructed Moses to strike a rock with his staff to bring forth water. The two white tablets shown near Moses’ head refer to another biblical event that took place in the wilderness. On Mount Sinai, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments written on two stone tablets.
Figure 11: Jonah Tossed Overboard. The biblical account of Jonah is a story of salvation, like many of the narratives Bostic liked to paint. This painting shows the moment when Jonah was being thrown from a ship by his fellow travelers. They did so to calm a stormy sea caused by Jonah’s flight from God. Jonah’s left foot just touches the lower jaw of the giant fish that will swallow him. The Bible tells of how God rescued Jonah and brought him to safety after he spent three days in the belly of the fish.
Figure 12: Behold the Lamb: Baptism of Jesus. John the Baptist (center left) and Jesus (right) stand knee-deep in a river. Jesus bends his head in preparation for baptism by John. Above Jesus’ head, a dove appears below a dramatic ray of light, rendered in white and tan shades. The Gospel of Luke identifies the dove as the Holy Spirit.
How did you become interested in religious art?
My interest in religious art largely came about because there was so little art of any quality to be seen in the fundamentalist Protestant church of my childhood. I always liked to draw, but we were people of the word, not the image. I became a writer and pursued a career in journalism, but art was never far from my mind. Studying Eastern European and Russian culture introduced me to the deeply spiritual imagery of Eastern Orthodox icon-makers. I found the beautifully serene portraits of Christ from iconographers like the 15th-century Russian painter Andrei Rublev to be a world apart from the over-reproduced Warner Sallman Head of Christ I knew when I was growing up. It was a turning point for me.
Tell us about your Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection.
After over 20 years working as a print journalist, I took a sabbatical to do freelance writing that became permanent. One of the first things I did was sign up for a workshop on icon-making. This inspired me to seek out contemporary artists working with religious themes. I had often heard it said that no good religious art could come out of our secular era. I found the exact opposite to be true, especially when I explored the work of folk and outsider artists, who flew under the radar screen of the art establishment. Setting 1900 as my boundary marker, I began collecting art with sacred subjects by artists from the modern (and post-modern) eras. After 17 years, I have over 1,500 pieces in my listings from around the globe. A fund-raising exhibition, East Meets West: Women Icon Makers of West Ukraine, is currently travelling to East Coast venues with contemporary Ukrainian icons from my collection.
John Kohan worked for TIME magazine for 22 years. He is a co-author of Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe and a contributor to The Christian Century. Kohan owns the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection of contemporary religious art and has curated numerous art exhibitions with pieces from his collection (sacredartpilgrim.com).
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