Artist Profile

Otto Rutt is a US Marine Corps fighter pilot turned painter and sculptor. Born the youngest of four and raised in Chicago, he is a combat veteran from the Persian Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. His education includes degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard. He completed his MFA at Florida Atlantic University in November, 2020.  

While growing up, Rutt had access to one of the world’s best art museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as access to inspiring public art from many masters. Rutt pursued contact with works from paragons like Picasso, Miro, Calder or Chagall. After retiring from the US Marine Corps, he started painting and sculpting in earnest. He is devoted to immersive artistic discovery – concepts, materials and techniques. In addition to painting and sculpture, Rutt has pursued printmaking and abstract photography. His personal history attests to journeys fraught with toil; he is now pursuing his creative passions full throttle.  

Bolder is better in Rutt’s aesthetic. He is driven by intellectual ideas which manifest in his aggressively working with media and material. He is an obsessive student of art, history and literature, and, he has read and studied the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays. He purposefully seeks to be expressive, complex, and engaging. In his work, we can find the embrace of big ideas and drama. Transcendence in Hamlet is an example; in 2018, he completed 15 paintings inspired from scenes that resonate with physical, emotional, and spiritual turmoil.  

When working and creating, Rutt begins with a vision to make art that spurs thinking – his own and his viewers’. His immediate objective is to produce visually compelling images and structures that capture a mysterious moment – the edge of reality, the whirl of an emotion, the energy of a quest. Often, these images are not contained strictly within the sources themselves, but are extensions of his imagination. Abstraction is a strategic choice for him because he finds it unconstrained and uniquely equipped to capture many meanings simultaneously. His paintings become dramatic through heavy use of material, strong colors, and large canvases or armature. He seeks to elevate and expand both the formal qualities and the creative context of the scene he is imagining.