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PrintOpposites attract
They are the Good Boy and Bad Boy of Tulsa artists, but Otto Duecker and Bill Rabon have more in common than many might think.
Although Bill Rabon, front, and Otto Duecker specialize in different artistic styles — Rabon in landscapes and figurative paintings and Duecker in still lifes, realism cutouts and now trompe l’oeil paintings of celebrities — M.A. Doran Gallery, 3509 S. Peoria Ave., has exhibited works by both artists for decades.
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To say that Otto Duecker and Bill Rabon are really good local artists is like saying the Himalayas are a bit steep.
These two Tulsa artists are enormously famous with jaw-dropping talent. Their paintings can sell for thousands of dollars. Their works hang in public and private collections.
And yet — to the amazement of some — they choose to live in Tulsa.
The two are as different as night and day. Sunshine and lightning bolts. Despite their maturity, they might even be considered the Good Boy and Bad Boy of Tulsa artists.
How they are different
Otto Frederick Duecker III looks exactly like what he is — an affable, articulate former high school teacher married to a librarian (Ellen) who was his college sweetheart. They live in midtown in a neat ranch-style house with a swimming pool with Pearl, their black standard poodle.
William Harwood Rabon is an affable, articulate artist who lives in a tiny apartment in north Tulsa. He has been married three times. He has always made his living as an artist. He says that at one time he did a lot of amphetamines and for a while he was semi-homeless. Even then, a TV crew came to film a documentary about him and his art.
How they are alike
M.A. Doran Gallery in Tulsa has represented both Duecker and Rabon since the 1980s.
“Each has a very strong sense of his own vision,” Mary Ann Doran says, “although their styles and visions are very different.”
Duecker made his bones painting floating fruit and realism cutouts but now specializes in trompe l’oeil paintings that appear to be snapshots of famous people taped to cracking surfaces.
Rabon is known for his landscapes and figurative paintings, which he focuses on now, but from 2000 to 2005 he created abstract paintings with powerful colors and visible brush strokes.
Both artists paint every day.
“Both,” Doran says, “are without a doubt two of our most popular artists.”
More similarities
For those of us who long for artists flamboyant and outrageous, Duecker and Rabon disappoint. Both acknowledge this fact.
Duecker, wearing a green/khaki shirt and shorts when I met him and recovering from a bad case of poison ivy, told me about his first art show in Santa Fe, N.M.: “I wore a button-down Polo shirt and khakis. Some 400-500 people attended the opening and not one person recognized me as the artist.
“Down the street at another gallery opening, the artist was dressed all in black. He had long hair down to the middle of his back and tattoos and piercings. This was in the 1970s, mind you. I said, ‘That’s what an artist should look like.’ My dealer said, ‘The wilder they are, the less they last.’”
Rabon, with a dapper gray moustache and receding gray hair, wore a white T-shirt and dark pants when we met. With his sophisticated vocabulary and knowledgeable references to American regionalism and abstract expressionism, he could have been a college professor relaxing off campus.
His conversation ranged from Alexandre Hogue (his former teacher at The University of Tulsa, whom he referred to casually as “Old Man Hogue”) to abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
“I’m not arty,” Rabon says, “but my life has been arty.”
He laughed when he described one art opening where the artist was nondescript but all of the audience wore berets and smoked cigarettes in long holders.
Both Duecker and Rabon choose to live in Oklahoma, but both have been to other rodeos.
Duecker, born in Milwaukee in 1948, was an army brat who lived in Holland, Germany, Turkey and Colorado before his family settled in Oklahoma, where he attended Oklahoma State University as a business major.
“Did you ever have a conversation that changed your life?” he asks.
He did. As a college sophomore home on vacation, a friend said, “You love to paint. What I think you ought to do is get a teaching degree and you can paint in the summers.” That’s what he did.
He taught art at Edison High School for 12 years, painting in the summers and on holidays.
“It was a hard slog,” he says.
