Brad and Sundie Ruppert assemble thousands of pieces of felt to replicate fur and feathers in their animal portraits. Writer: Mary Boldinova Photos: Courtesy of Brad and Sundie Ruppert Walking into Brad and Sundie Ruppert’s Norwalk home and studio feels like stepping into a quirky art museum — c urious handmade furniture, 5-foot-tall paintings, decor so unusual it makes you want to study every nook and cranny. The open space is both colorful and joyful, like the eyes of the artists themselves in brightly framed glasses — orange on Brad and turquoise on Sundie. Their living room holds enough art to rival a small gallery. Sundie laughs at the observation and says, “Welcome to our house.” Some of the artwork is the Rupperts’ own, and most of what isn’t they’ve traded with artist friends over the years. Since the late ’80s, the couple have worked with a range of media, creating everything from handpainted apparel to pottery to custom signs, upcycled furniture and more. That was until they discovered a new medium — sculptural felt — and turned it into the centerpiece of their signature, award-winning work. Together, the Rupperts create mixed-media sculptures, often animal portraits and abstract work, made with felt salvaged from the cutting-room floor of Greeley Hat Works in Colorado. Their work has long been rooted in the idea of seeing things for what they could be rather than what they are, and sculptural felt is exactly that, combining creativity and sustainability. “People always ask, ‘Did you go to college?’ Yeah, but nobody teaches you how to use trash and make it into high-end art in college,” Sundie said. The production of each piece is a carefully organized process. First, Sundie makes the sketch. With the help of an overhead projector, it’s transferred onto carved wood. Brad cuts the felt remnants trimmed off the brims of cowboy hats — material otherwise headed for the landfill — and nails the pieces one by one onto the wood base. Then Sundie jumps in again to add the paint and fine details that gives each piece its final character. “We both work on every single piece, but we have completely different jobs and we do not do each other’s work,” Sundie said. “We can conceptualize together and we collaborate, but we stay in our own lanes, which keeps us married.” Over the past decade, the artists have picked up numerous awards and honors in art shows across the country. The Rupperts’ work was featured in Western Art and Architecture, as well as the Associated Press. Nearly 100 of their works are displayed across the sprawling corporate campus of Epic Systems, a healthcare software company near Madison, Wisconsin. That collection includes sculptural animals tucked into themed buildings ranging from a “Harry Potter”-inspired wizarding center to a “Star Wars” auditorium. The process for creating animal artwork felt intuitive to the couple, but their transition to abstract work took more effort. After decades of cooperative work with relatively few communication snags, the Rupperts had to learn to convey abstract ideas to build a shared vision. They started with experimental pieces inspired by Mark Rothko paintings and expanded into geometric abstracts. “I usually enter two different bodies of work in the shows we want to do,” Sundie said. “This year, for the first time ever, we got accepted into more shows with abstracts than we did animals.” This fall, the Rupperts head to Philadelphia for the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show Sept. 18-20, before the Armonk Art Show the following weekend in New York’s Hudson Valley. When the new year rolls around, the snowbird artists will be back in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the annual 10-week Celebration of Fine Art. The first year they set up their booth at the festival in Arizona, the artists discovered their work doubled as acoustic treatment, with dampening properties on par with acoustic foam. “That’s one of the big things that we’ve learned through clients that we didn’t even know when we started working with the felt,” Sundie said. “The fact that our work has a function to it encourages us to explore what else we can do with that.” Each art show reveals something new about what their work can do — as art, as design and even as function. But back home in Norwalk, surrounded by the pieces they’ve made together, the Rupperts are still most inspired by the possibilities waiting in the next pile of scraps. In recent years, the Rupperts’ artwork has expanded into abstraction. A surprise bonus: It dampens noise. ...read more read less