What I love about water – ocean, lake, river, waterfall – is how it is always changing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même. Change is inevitable. The challenge is how to capture the depth, the movement. In my abstract, acrylic paintings, water sometimes looks like water, but it also sometimes looks like space or sky. Honestly, it’s not something I always control. Some paintings just happen.
What I love about water – ocean, lake, river, waterfall – is how it is always changing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même. Change is inevitable. The challenge is how to capture the depth, the movement. In my abstract, acrylic paintings, water sometimes looks like water, but it also sometimes looks like space or sky. Honestly, it’s not something I always control. Some paintings just happen.
RUTH HURD
FINE ART





Flying from NYC to Calgary, Alberta, the view outside my window was beautiful: fuzzy clouds and the hint of a gold and pink sunset. One of the interesting things about my paintings is that water and sky are often interchangeable. When trying to recreate a memory of water (lake, ocean), the resulting painting can often look like sky, or outer space. And the reverse is often true: sky/clouds sometimes look like the ocean. 2018 Acrylic on raw canvas Size: 18"x 24" $460

It's great working in a series: you can see different ways of treating a subject ... like a sunset. This is the fourth of four paintings based on a friend's photo of a sunset on the island of Socotra, just off the coast of Yemen. It's the most abstract of the four; the first one was very representational and looked a lot like the photo. Each one since has been more and more abstract. It's my way of experimenting with a subject I love. 2014 Acrylic on paper Size: 18"x 24 $460

I started painting this with the gold on the bottom. It was going to be called "Fields of Gold." However, once I realized it worked much better with the gold on top, I decided to just call it Gold. I wanted to escape my typical colors and go with the complementary colors of yellow and purple. So what started as an exercise ended up as a real painting. Sometimes you have to abandon your own judgements and let the painting tell you what works. 2018 Acrylic on raw canvas Size: 20"x16" $350

Flying from NYC to Calgary, Alberta, the view outside my window was beautiful: fuzzy clouds and the hint of a gold and pink sunset. One of the interesting things about my paintings is that water and sky are often interchangeable. When trying to recreate a memory of water (lake, ocean), the resulting painting can often look like sky, or outer space. And the reverse is often true: sky/clouds sometimes look like the ocean. 2018 Acrylic on raw canvas Size: 18"x 24" $460