John W. Rutland

John Rutland was born in the mountains of Western North Carolina. His love of the mountains and the woods led him to his career in forestry. His foray into the creative was born in plowed fields where he began to collect the arrowheads upon which he occasionally stumbled. As his collection grew, rather than amass them in a box to gather dust in a closet, John chose to honor these creations carved by the artists of thousands of years ago. He mounted them upon wood from the mountains’ trees under whose ancestors they were shaped, forming with the arrowheads the profile of the braves who once struck and flinted them into being.

Trees continued to lure John deeper into the creative. His ability to look upon a tree and envision the grains within its trunk inspired him to select trees for their inherent beauty. From the forest to the sawmill, through the processes of cutting, planing, and drying, John turned the trees into canvasses. Upon these artworks of nature, John’s artistic dimension again emerged as he burned into them his poems, the words of sages, and geometric figures. The arrowheads were one set of the branching tree limbs of John’s creativity, the hewn tablets of the trunks were another interlaced network; the whole of this tree of art yearning to leap into form awaited on the ocean’s shores.

As classic tales tell us, serendipity is often the mischievous muse leading us to a solution we only dimly know we are seeking. Thus it was for John. In a manner parallel to the arrowheads churned up from deeper layers in the fields of Western North Carolina, John and his partner stumbled upon sharks’ teeth. Often broken from the unrelenting currents of time and the jaws of the machines that dredged them from the bottom of the ocean, these relics of sea creatures lay strewn upon the shore. Like children on a treasure hunt, they were awed and delighted by each fragment they found: sharks’ teeth and vertebrae, fossilized pieces of whales, dolphins, sharks and horses. Unlike many other collectors, they were as entranced by the broken teeth as they were by the prized whole teeth. Oh, these primordial fragments, tens of millions of years old, ransacked from the depths, tossed and scattered by tides! 

In one of those “aha!” moments that bespeaks of the breaking through of a deeper layer of knowing into the light of awareness, the pieces came together. Pieces of the mountains in the cherry tree John sees in its majesty, nearing the end of its life; pieces of the seas’ deep life tumbled onto beaches in ancient teeth and fossils. As he and those who transcend the wounds of living and losing, loving and growing come to know in the journey of healing, the most moving beauty is often revealed through the transformation of the broken into a new wholeness. This is what John’s shark teeth mosaics manifest.