Just when you think you know an artist, they throw something like this at you. It’s not just that Joe Rudko (metaphorically) tossed his photographs and X-Acto knife; it’s that he (literally) took oil pastels—the fancy cousin of crayons—and drew directly on the gallery wall. In wobbly rainbo w letters, he spelled out his name and the words “MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY.” The nerve.  Over the past decade, Rudko has built a career of photo collage—collecting vintage photographs that he cuts into precise squares, strips, and shapes, then meticulously assembles into heavily patterned, kaleidoscopic, or geometric abstractions. He has mastered the technique. He sells them through his galleries. He’s even commissioned to make family portraits using other people’s family photos, sliced and diced and woven into tapestries of limbs and smiles and homes and pets. (You can find a Stranger 2022 interview with him here.) Rudko’s most recent body of work, exhibited last month at Winston Wächter Fine Art, was nothing like this. Meditations in an Emergency was messy, primal, smeary, powdery—explosions of feelings smeared across paper. How do these two bodies of work relate? Will the real Joe Rudko please stand up? Of course, artists are meant to play and paint outside the lines—that’s kind of their job—but to present something this divergent, especially in a commercial gallery, is both risky and unusual. “A lot of artists have a side thing they do with no pressure,” Rudko said during a recent studio visit. “Sometimes that becomes the real work.” At the studio, he took me back to the beginning. We flipped through books of photographs he made while working at Western Washington University’s photocopy shop as a student. At that time, he was taking photographs of unremarkable, throwaway things—scraps of crumpled paper or the perforated edge of a spiral-bound notebook page—and transforming them with incandescent backdrops and gradient backgrounds. Eventually, that turned into interrupting the photographs with glitching patterns, breaking the images into halves. Finally, he arrived at fracturing the images completely, physically cutting them into unrecognizable parts. “It was something I wasn’t allowed to do when I was young,” Rudko says. “It felt rebellious to tear a picture, to draw inside of it.”  This little taste of transgression threads throughout his work. Raised in an evangelical Christian church, where truth was presented as immovable and immutable, he found photography to be fertile ground for interrogating the truthiness of images. In Rudko’s hands, the photograph begins as a monolithic representation of the truth, then transforms into something it’s not. “I liked thinking about a photograph as something that felt like a rock—something that couldn’t be changed—and then changing it, while it still remains that rock.” Rudko studied both photography and drawing at Western, but his relationship to the latter shifted in 2017, when he was hospitalized at Harborview Medical Center for treatment of bipolar disorder. He had coped with intense mood swings throughout his adult life, but it wasn’t until his neighbor, Ellen Forney, gave him a copy of her graphic memoir Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me that he began to have an inkling of what was going on.  Rudko received a formal diagnosis at that time. It was during his inpatient psychiatric care that he encountered Frank O’Hara’s poetry, the slender volume of Meditations in an Emergency gifted to him by a friend. It was also at this time that he turned to drawing as a means of regulating mood. Every morning, he set the timer on his seasonal affective disorder lamp for 30 minutes, a blank sheet of paper in front of him. The only task for the next half hour was to fill it up. He used a cheap ($6) box of pastels to push color and lines across the page. It was the start of a practice that would extend across the next decade.  Rudko had been told there is a “proper” way of doing oil pastels, but he never learned it. Instead, he just drew, developing an intuitive process all his own.  ‘Hourglass’ by Joe Rudko Most drawings begin as a melty gradient, made by grinding pastel sticks to powder that is rubbed and buffed into the paper. Then comes the crude but careful marks—bright streaks carved into the soft background. Some look like fractured letterforms or calligraphic strokes wandering off the page. Others suggest garbled stick figures, facing off or intertwined.  In naming the abstractions, Rudko yanks them from the land of scribble back into the realm of objects. Like Hourglass. The ground is a starburst of peach blush; a cryptic blossom of blistered rust encroaches across the upper left. Thick, deckled lines of coral, carmine, taupe, beige, and a streak of black burst outward from the center of the page, forming a double-cone, hyperboloid shape. In the gallery, it’s labeled Hourglass, but in the studio, Rudko was calling it Whisk.  The names tell us everything and nothing, all at once—an entry point and invitation to free-associate. One woman came into the gallery and was immediately drawn to a drawing of a heavy, blockish black shape against a background of bilious yellow, peach, and pea green. The piece is aggressively ugly. She bought it immediately because she said she saw her dog in it. The piece was titled Shadow. So was her dog. A whisk by any other name… ‘Shadow’ by Joe Rudko Rudko chose the title for his show simply because the book caught his eye one day—no reason deeper than “it would make a great title.” Yet, Rudko’s and O’Hara’s respective Meditations share more than just a name. By trade, O’Hara was a journalist and curator (at the Museum of Modern Art). He wrote his restless, diaristic poems during lunch breaks—a side project that would become his defining work.  What makes this nervy about-turn in Rudko’s work hit so right is that it feels so free. His personal journey, intertwined with his art, is an embodiment of the sentiment the only way out is through—and there’s something good waiting on the other side. It also leaves us with a sense of sovereignty; maybe we have more of it than we think. Whether Rudko’s Meditations are a meander or a defining moment shaping the next decade ahead, it’s a pleasure to be along for the journey. 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