Artist Was Master of a Full Life

Life wasn’t a straight line for Nancy Rupp.

An Iowa girl, she grew up 1,500 miles from the nearest pelican and became a marine biologist.

Years later, she put aside her microscopes and collection jars, though not her exquisite powers of observation: After raising two children, Rupp became an internationally respected master of Chinese brush painting.

Two weeks ago, she was knocked down by a car colliding into another that had stopped for her at an Ojai crosswalk. She dislocated a knee, bashed her hand and cracked a bone in her leg.

While she didn’t spend a single night in the hospital, she marveled over her close escape: “I’ve been given an incredible second chance,” she told friends. “One more step and I would have been under that car.”

On Tuesday, to the shock of all who knew her, she died.

“You just kick yourself,” said Stuart Rupp, her husband of 32 years. “You think you have a little education, but you don’t know the first thing about this and we weren’t advised in any way, shape or form.”

Since her accident, Nancy had been recovering at home. Some nights, artist friends from Ojai would drive up a gravel road in the woods to the couple’s house, bearing covered dishes and wine. The swelling in her leg was subsiding. Yet she was frustrated that she didn’t feel better. Instead, her aches and pains were growing worse. She grew increasingly tired. Her heart would race; for the first time in her 57 years, she was having what seemed to be panic attacks.

On Tuesday morning, she nearly fainted as her husband tried to get her into the car for a doctor’s appointment.

“I went upstairs and called the doctor’s office, and they were prescribing anxiety medication,” Stuart Rupp said. “I was watching out the window, as I’m doing now. I didn’t realize it, but I was watching her die. She raised her hand up once and slumped back, and I went out to her.”

An autopsy found that she died from a pulmonary embolism stemming from her injuries, he said. No citations have been issued in the accident, which Ojai police said is still under investigation.

However that turns out, the town this week is grieving.

On Thursday, the waitresses at Bonnie Lu’s cafe remembered her. Nancy Rupp often would order lunch, take it to her studio just behind the arcade cafe, and later return her dishes.

“Delicious!” she’d always say. “As usual!”

Her studio was crammed with hundreds of her works--paintings of horses and willow trees, ducks and mountains, some accompanied by Chinese characters and all done with painstaking simplicity. A chatty woman, Rupp gladly showed passersby around, talking with equal ease about ocean fishing, teenage angst, or the show she just had in Taipei. Her dog, Rosie, sighed in a corner.

Rupp studied in China and exhibited widely.

“She ranked among the very finest brush painters in America,” said Ning Yeh, a Huntington Beach artist who is a former president of a group called American Artists of Chinese Brush Painting. “She was clever and spontaneous. It seemed like she had no limitations.”

Maggie Garrett, one of Rupp’s students, called her “a shining spirit.”

“Here’s this wonderful, lively, Midwestern-born woman who paints like an old Chinese master, and she’s joking around and laughing with them,” she said. “They really respected her for this very special thing she had, this chi, this life force. They could see it in the strength of her line.”

Sometimes Rupp would teach by grasping a student’s hand and painting through them.

“She’d show you how she wanted you to feel,” Garrett said. “You’d feel how she was drawing a bird or a tree or a Chinese character, how she moved her arm, how she held the brush. She’ll be at the heart of every brush I own, for the rest of my life.”

A memorial celebration for Nancy Rupp will be held at the Ojai Arts Center on March 29 at 4 p.m.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com