Robert Allen Ruckman

Robert Allen Ruckman is a self- taught artist living in Winston-Salem, NC. After having geometric visions as a young man that “revealed the order behind chaos”, Robert came to an understanding of what he calls the “archetypal hexagon that underlies the creation of clouds, waves, and universes”. This revelation inspired the development of his unique approach to form, technique and content.

Using ancient hermetic practices informed by years of study and meditation, Robert evokes the Law of Attraction, magnetizing the flowing colors that coalesce into each painting. The images that emerge from this process are the result of co-creation with his subject, constituting what he calls "energetic portraiture". 

He has participated in group shows throughout the southeastern US, has collaborated in multiple two artist shows with William Fields, and in 2015 had a single artist exhibit at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC. 

“Ruckman’s creative method is spontaneous and condensed, dependent on unpredictable, quickly achieved effects rather than an evolving process of composition over an extended period. The result is a visual language entirely different from the one Fields uses. In keeping with his regular practice of attending closely to astrological phenomena, Ruckman typically coordinates his painting sessions with lunar transitions, equinoxes and/or solstices--the optimum periods for creative activity, in his view. To make his 12 acrylic paintings--with titles identical to those Fields applied to his drawings--Ruckman worked on 60-by-60-inch canvases, ceremoniously commencing each one by drawing a central triangle, inside which he inscribed the name or magical seal of the entity to be celebrated in the painting. This practice was a means of soliciting the entity’s participation in the painting. Ruckman chose the colors as he always does, through an intuitive process involving a synesthetic experience of color and sound, according to his account, so that he “hears” the colors as well as seeing them. The chromatic range extends from bold primaries to black, white, several shades of gold and other more subdued hues, along with various admixtures. He intermingles these colors in organic swirls, splashes, rivulets and whiplashing trails, sometimes allowing them to coalesce into eruptive forms or florescent patterns. They’re like visual traces of spontaneous dance performances, or illuminated sparkler fireworks waved around in outdoor darkness. They invite superficial comparison to abstract-expressionism, but are more closely akin to the multicolored ameboid forms that continuously morphed on the overhead screens of rock-concert venues during the psychedelic light shows of the late 1960s. For Ruckman the somewhat similar effects that distinguish his paintings aren’t merely random; they’re traces of actions performed, or at least strongly influenced, by the Jupiter entities invoked for this project. The fluid bilateral symmetries and striking hints of figuration in some of the paintings suggest that the spirits, having been summoned, might even be playfully manifesting themselves in quasi-human form.”

-Tom Patterson