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
Experiments
Experiments, with repetition, have a way of becoming standard operating procedure, not ho-hum exactly, but not as exciting and different, not as challenging. Lately (2021), I've been experimenting with painting on gessoed canvas, using a brush or a palette knife to lay the acrylic paint on the canvas. You can tell which is which just by looking at the painting. The combination of my shaky hand and the novel use of a palette knife makes for some interesting effects. Painting with a brush on gessoed canvas allows me to (sometimes) make the brushstrokes visible. In 2019, playing with alcohol inks on a variety of surfaces was really liberating, seeing just what the medium could do. Earlier, with acrylic, I initially used it thinly, very much like watercolor, but then also very thickly … all in the same time period (2016 - ). I’ve experimented with pastels and collage, while also doing watercolors. Painting with thinned acrylic (on raw canvas since 2018 … very different from watercolor paper) has, for me, now moved into the mainstream (see Atmospheric).
