RUSTEDBLUE = RELAUNCH 2012

Smartmouth Designs = CHICAGO

RUSTEDBLUE BRANDING PROJECT # 3

Branding for Client = Twin Buttes Enterprises

#REGIONUP

Notes for “City of Champions” or “Rusted Amition”
© Tyler Lennox Bush 2012

Pittsburgh to me is a Mythic Place… My Mount Olympus…VALHALLA …The Place where my Heroes Worked....Where they Made The Things…Made the World Go Round….

Championships & Steel…

It was under a Pile of Shit and Cinders that would birth an idea….a way of life that these Heroes upheld…

The values of a Nation.

It was the Workshop of Big Red…My Grandfather…a Millwright and Craftsman….He was a Large Man….and He Moved Mountains in those Valleys…He Moved Men…

I however grew up world away….in a place called THE REGION….an industrial wasteland on the southern rim of The Great Lake Michigan….my father had left the valleys and rivers of western PA in search of work…in search of self…when the great fountains of Pittsburgh would flow with IRON no more

SOME SAY THEY WERE RUSTED....THEY were Rusted By the Weather of Life...By each other...by the one who was supposed to protect them from the elements....and they were melancholy because of it...They were Blue....But when the sun rose over the mount the next day they were no worse for the wear....and in that sun grew a great tree ...and it gave life to the truth of their suffering....the fruits of a family...and though the pain may be bitter the fruit is not...

My return to Pittsburgh in 2012 is a way of reconnecting with my ancestors….of finding the source of which the story RUSTED:BLUE is given its life….and to complete the circle for father….grandfather….and one day MY children!

Rising from the Cinders is the Production Company = RUSTED:BLUE
Using a blue-collar approach to service...& Craftsmanship with Soul...we create advertising and communication strategy with calloused hands...It is our passion to create your story...

contact = tyler@rustedblue.com = to start your journey!

BIO of The Artist = Tyler Lennox Bush

Tyler Bush finds lost objects. He mends them, bends them, and builds with them. Tyler has always worked with found objects. Tyler has sought out, rediscovered, and celebrated “things passed over and things discarded” since early in his childhood. Tyler is an artist whose unique talent for rediscovery introduces to each other objects and people otherwise segregated by time and space. His art is in many ways archeology, and in many ways anthropology.

In early childhood, with Cardboard boxes, old wrapping paper tubes, couch cushions, and garbage bags; Ty built cities of scrap across the living room. He “borrowed” his father’s tools, took old discarded deck boards littered with rusty nails; he taught himself to saw, to hammer, to plane, to level; and he built a cabin for himself and his things in the backyard. He took a pair of too-small football shoulder pads, an old turtle neck, a colonial ascot, a pair of women’s lace up boots, a smoker’s jacket cut at the seam, and a pair of tan Z. Cavaricci’s, and created to this day the most convincing costume rendition of the Headless Horseman this side of Tim Burton.

As his art matured, It began to reflect not Tyler’s playful, whimsical spirit; but rather his deeper spiritual, humane concerns. His young artistic life culminated with a serial production entitled: Gateways and Alters. Monolithic in nature, Tyler created massive tributes to the ethereal space between two worlds using discarded industrial chain, fallen timber, monolithic chunks of limestone, barn boards, and mariner’s hemp rope fastened with timber pegs, railroad spikes, and old twine. Tyler’s found objects frame his doors to divinity.

Tyler’s diverse personal interests and experiences give him the unique perspective that real gift and real value can be discovered anywhere from anything and most importantly in anyone. At only 21, Tyler proved himself an exceptional talent, as a recognized artist, a skilled athlete (Intercollegiate All-American wrestler, marathon runner, avid yoga practitioner) and an accomplished scholar( a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Wabash College).

Yet, as with so many of us, Tyler’s journey had only begun. Artists don’t find there’s to be a lucrative vocation. Two years later found Ty in Nashville, TN, working as a finish carpenter for a fly-by-night remodeler to second rate Stars. When his ’78 Chevy truck couldn’t get him to work any longer, he hitched a ride home to Indiana. Tyler tended bar, taught art classes, coached wrestling, all the while wrestling with himself. He found himself in the all too familiar cycle of nothing-to-do weeks and over- indulgent weekends.

Ty ran. He ran into the bankruptcy of a failed business. He ran into the escape of substance. He ran to Chicago and spent weekends taking comedy writing classes at Second City. He ran to Milwaukee and starred in a never seen independent film. And then, He ran like a rabbit from a hound dog in circles to New York City, not sure why he was running but sure he couldn’t stand still.

New York can be a Midwestern man’s master, ask Jay Gatsby. Tyler spent four years in Manhattan executing extraordinary multi-million dollar bar and restaurant renovations at locales such as European Union and Boqueria, expanding his fine arts resume at the prestigious Atlantic Theatre Company, all the while sinking lower into the depression of running in rabbit circles he so tried to escape. After four years and despite commercial and artistic successes, no longer able to pay his bills in an already depraved section of Manhattan’s lower Eastside where his Subterranean bedroom never saw daylight, Tyler found himself living in an apartment shell in February; agreeing to rehab it-no running water, no affordable heat, his tools in hawk, showering at the YMCA-burned out, run down, strung out, done.

Tyler left New York defeated. He again, came home. Home again, to the all-too-familiar cycle of nothing-to-do weekdays and over indulgent weekends. Home again to a string of bartending jobs in low tip joints and part time can’t pay the bills craftsman’s nightmares. Tyler Bush, athlete, scholar, and artist had become obsolete. He was a warped old barn board, a too-small pair of football shoulder pads, a novel with chapters torn out, a rusted car fender-A lost object.

Tyler Bush finds lost objects. And although the search was arduous, somewhere in the back of the barn buried beneath a pile of old tools and scrapped metal, he found himself, rusted but ready to be rediscovered. From the bottom of this pile of shit and cinders, Tyler began the most ambitious project an artist can aspire too. Rusted Blue, his magnum opus. LIVING ART. Real People Artists, Everyman Picasso’s celebrating together with others their own life, their experience captured on film, in print, in music, in poetry, in philanthropy, in truth. Creating a forum for the collective voice of Found Objects like himself to tell their story through their medium of choice, then giving this Living Art a name, a brand, and a product that speaks to the journey of every found object. RUSTED BLUE is what he calls it. Whenever someone dons Rusted Blue attire, attends a Rusted Blue event, Posts on a Rusted Blue blog they add to the tapestry of experience that every Found Object travels. A journey from utility as society had intended to uselessness to usefulness as something greater, as an individual, as ART.

Tyler Bush is the first found object placed in this growing tapestry. He is the magnet that draws each and every new piece to this never-ending human sculpture. The honesty of his journey gives courage to new voices.


TYLER BUSH IS.

Written By: Chadwick 2011