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PrintMore with Otto Duecker and Bill Rabon
These Tulsa artists have personalities as different as their artistic styles.
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Bill Rabon and Otto Duecker are as fascinating as they are talented. And yet, their personalities, like their art, are radically different from one another.
Whereas Duecker might begin a personal story saying, “When I’m on the golf course…” Rabon’s more hair-raising tales start, “The time my car broke down and I was walking across the Mohave Desert and had a heat stroke…” or “That day there was a gang shoot-out in the parking lot outside my apartment… .”
To learn more about these intriguing men, read on.
More with Bill Rabon
Your landscapes are so well known; why did you switch to abstracts?
One day in February 2000, I stopped painting landscapes. I could not paint one more sky, not another tree. I had my first abstract show in August of that year, and we could not put them on the wall fast enough.
How is painting landscapes different from abstracts?
Abstract painting — it’s a way of thinking. Your way of thinking changes. Abstract pushes against you. You can’t muscle it or it will get pouty, fight back and get mean on you.
It’s almost a narcotic. I can understand how abstract expressionist painting was combined with narcotics in the New York art world. Willem de Kooning painted the city (of New York) as tension, not reality. Jackson Pollock was more interested in the movement (than the finished painting). When he was through with a painting, you could use it for a rug for all he cared.
Tell me about this abstract painting (on his studio wall). The colors — dark blue, green, purple, red — are so dramatic.
It’s more abstract impressionist. It’s titled “09:25:03” — the moment the atomic bomb exploded at Hiroshima. The mushroom cloud didn’t interest me, but at this exact time, that column of fire and the searing blast of 60 million degrees as it tears open the fabric of reality — it’s real time. And, despite the destruction, it is really beautiful. It was 1945 and I was a little boy in Muskogee. I saw the picture in the newspaper. People went out into the street to dance. Later I got a book out of the library and read about it.
You’re known for the texture of your brush strokes. How do you do that?
I do an underpainting first, then trace the painting on it. That gives it a rich effect.
Can you identify a turning point in your artistic career?
I grew up in a strict religious home. That is a great propellant — a strong force. The real turning point was my paintings “The Crucifixion of the Gargoyle” and “The Fallen Angel.” Both are in private collections. And paintings I did on the book of Revelation.
When I saw the burning oil fields in Kuwait (part of the televised newscasts of the 1991 Gulf War), I said, “My God. That looks like the ‘book of Revelations’ — that oil pouring onto the sea and ground all on fire.”
Those paintings will knock your socks off. They are not for sale. Some people found them very disturbing. These paintings are almost a rebellion against my strict religious upbringing, but they are also paintings of redemption.
Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual?
I am very spiritual. This came from many theological sources and the influence of different people. It didn’t hatch in one day. I was raised with the Bible as the word of God. I have a command of the Bible, but I didn’t really understand the Bible until I was 60 years old.
In Oklahoma, we are theologically shallow. We have big churches, but they don’t know their theology. It’s like standing in the middle of the huge Lake Chapala in Mexico — you can be in the middle of the lake but only up to your knees in water.
You speak so fondly of living in what you call “Little Bohemia” in Tulsa. Tell us about that.
Tulsa’s “Little Bohemia” — we called it “The Boheme” — nestled up next to downtown Tulsa. Roughly Elwood to Peoria and 11th Street and Denver to 15th Street and Denver. I lived there from 1962 to 1972. It was like Greenwich Village (in New York) or the Left Bank (in Paris) — lots of artists, Tulsa painters, photographers, writers. The north side and the south side came together there. Lot of people from the blue-blood neighborhoods. Then, the Inner Dispersal Loop eliminated that community.
Where did you live after that?
I lived in an apartment over Zeigler’s (Ziegler Art and Frame, 6 N. Lewis Ave.) for 14 years. That was a very productive time for me. In the winter of 2007, a neighbor’s pipes burst and Ziegler’s closed the apartments. That was my whole world — the apartment, the art supply store downstairs. I didn’t know what to do. I sat in my car and cried.
