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
Atmospheric
In 2017... no longer wanting to create specific memories of precise events or locations, I decided to focus on the feeling, that amorphous sense of what the memory was all about: the unknowable depth of the ocean, the always changing movement of water, the vastness of the western plains sky, the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t feeling of looking at something that should be very recognizable but isn’t because of forest fire smoke, the chest expanding beauty of a sunset… But in 2020, the pandemic hit and for a year and a half we stopped being able to travel. My paintings became even less tethered to real, concrete places and are even more about what I am feeling or want to feel. Now that I've started to travel again, I've continued to use the beautiful reality to trigger paintings that simply express how that beauty makes me feel.
