Sterling Rathsack
FINE ART
About
After earning BFA and MA degrees, Sterling worked full time making his living as a professional artist for twenty five years. Retired from teaching at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in the Spring of 2023, Sterling continues to reside in Superior Wisconsin. Art has always been and continues to be his way of life.
Sterling Rathsack, 2020
I am a Storyteller.
"For all my efforts experimenting with and developing various kinds of art works, I invariably return to painting as the medium best suited to self-expression. I am a storyteller. The narratives in my paintings are the material of my life. The images I create reflect the people, places and events I’ve encountered."
"My stories are told in color and light. Some of them simply recall visual events, others are more personal. I don’t paint nostalgia, still I often refer to events in my past. That’s probably due to the persistent belief that human experience keeps going around and coming around. As individuals and nations we change and remain the same, for better or worse."
Biography
Sterling Rathsack graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Superior with BFA and MA degrees and worked for twenty-five years earning his living exclusively as a sculptor and painter. His paintings and sculpture have made their way into corporate, private and public collections regionally and abroad.
"Most of my paintings are narratives of personal encounters or autobiographical stories.
My first body of autobiographical works comprised sixty or so paintings that represented my life experience from birth to leaving home at eighteen. That group of paintings was exhibited at the Tweed Museum, Duluth, Minnesota in 1988 and went out into the world in various forms of exhibition and sales to individuals and institutions. Several ended up in a gallery in Kamakura, Japan."
"I produced another body of narrative works in the late 1990s called In Siam. Based on
my two and a half years witness to the effect of war in Southeast Asia, that group of sixty plus paintings reflect on the disruptive nature of war away from the front. First exhibited in 1999 at the Duluth Art Institute, Duluth, Minnesota, those paintings can stand on their own as individual works of art, but have been interpreted as a document on the collateral damage of war."