Isabel Rucker is a multi-disciplinary artist living on the Mendocino coast of California. She works in many media to explore color abstraction, shape, and environment. Recent sculptures and paintings are inspired by sunlight refraction, illumination, and reflection throughout the natural world. She finds phenomena like these stunningly beautiful but transitory in a way that appeals to her love of abstraction. Isabel also works figuratively and often begins a visual evolution by drawing and painting from nature. She is a professional jeweler fabricating metal, sculpting casting wax, and carving stones. Throughout her large and small, abstract and figurative, work she creates threads of visual connections.

Isabel recently returned to the California coast from the Rocky Mountains and is absorbing the change in environment. She grew up in America, young childhood was in New York and Virginia with two years in Germany and when she was eleven her family drove across the country to the California Bay Area where she spent formative young adult years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at University of Oregon and returned to California for years in Santa Cruz and San Francisco. She met her husband in the Rocky Mountains and moved to Wyoming for seventeen years. In Wyoming she expanded her jewelry business and art portfolio; there she also owned a retail gallery, made public commissioned sculptures, and exhibited paintings. In 2020 she and her husband moved to Fort Bragg, California where she now has her studio and jewelry business.

A few exhibition and public art opportunities:

2021 sculptural installation “The Beauty of Refraction” at the Larry Spring Museum in Fort Bragg, Ca.

2020 began with participating in group show Wallpaper by Teton Art Lab in Jackson, Wy. The year ended with painting a new mural at the Box Shop in San Francisco. Throughout the pandemic she worked almost daily in her studio on jewelry, painting, and sculpture.

2019, she installed a solo show at St. John’s Hospital in Jackson, Wy. as part of the Art and Healing program. She also created her second public sculpture for Jackson Hole Public Arts’ ArtSpot in downtown Jackson, Wy. In the autumn of 2019, she built a temporary sculpture for JH Public Arts’ PARKing Day and exhibited sculptures at West Weird Gallery.

2018, she installed a solo exhibit of her paintings in the Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wy.

2017, Isabel was a resident artist at the Jentel Foundation in 2017 where she worked on paintings.

She owned an art gallery, Isabel Jewelry and Gallery, in Pinedale, Wy. from 2010-2016.

2009 she installed a 450 foot long comic scroll, Unfurling at SOMArts in San Francisco.

She received a BA, Fine Arts, from University of Oregon. She is continuing her education to become a Graduate Gemologist from Gemological Institute of America.

She works full-time in her jewelry studio and her business is Isabel Jewelry: www.isabeljewelry.com.

Contact for questions or full CV:

e-mail: isabel@isabelrucker.com

phone: (307) 231-0515