The Ruby Walker Art Update: June 2023

This is the back-issue of my email newsletter! I’ll be posting each of these montly newsletters about a month late for posterity. And so that the only posts on this website aren’t my silly MS Paint doodles and pretentious essays from when I was 17. (I just read through all of them and realized I need to update this blog if I don’t want “Top 10 Gayest Paintings of Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus” to be all that represents me as a professional artist online. I mean, I stand by that ranking, but still.)

New Studio Goofin’

Hello friends,

It’s been a really wild couple of weeks. I graduated from college, moved to Iowa the next day (I know, Iowa?? But it’s really nice here!), and now I’m in the process of furnishing my very first solo art studio!

I love my new studio. Yes, it’s 90 square feet in a church basement, but it’s my 90 square feet in a church basement. It even has a fan built into the window so I won’t have to huff paint fumes while I work. Basically heaven.

My needs for my studio are more functional than aesthetic right now. I need to look through Facebook Marketplace and the local goodwill for some small storage shelves. But as long as I have something to put my palette on and something to sit on, I can put everything else together gradually.

What I’ve been working on:

I really try to treat my art with the seriousness of work, but at the same time, keep it playful and fun. That’s a tough line to walk, but if I’m not having fun, it’s really hard to put in the hours and effort that it takes to make something I’m proud of. And I have quite a few commissions on my plate right now. So I stay silly like it’s a full-time job.

With that in mind, I wanted to “break the ice” in my new studio and get started with something easy and familiar: a continuation of a personal series, from an existing reference, and not one of my commission projects. (I was also worried that my first painting after taking a month to hang my senior show, graduate, and move would be ugly; I wanted to take the pressure off.)

So this one is based on a set of photos I took in the screen printing darkroom back at Trinity. The overhead lamp is a dim reddish amber, but when you’re exposing a screen on the light table, it sends this sliver of bright blue-white light out across the lower part of the room. I love weird lighting situations.

This is a continuation of my “body doubles” series. I’ve been coy about overexplaining these paintings on social media, but it’s not really a secret either; I’ll tell you what I really think about. My only request is that you take a minute and look at this painting before you read ahead. What does it make you think about? My answer isn’t the answer.

When I was younger and a lot more mentally ill I would have semi-regular bouts of depersonalization. That is, feeling like I wasn’t myself, wasn’t really “in” there. There were two of me: the body, and the entity looking out from behind the eyes. Or sometimes I would feel (in a metaphorical sense; I wasn’t hallucinating) like I was watching myself from several feet away. I could see my hands but I couldn’t move them. I could move my mouth but I couldn’t speak.

It’s actually pretty common to feel this way on rare occasions (according to Wikipedia at least), but for me, it was frequent and disorienting. Looking back, I consider it part of my experience with depression and trauma.

So that’s what those double portraits are about for me. Even if you don’t relate to my interpretation, I hope you get something out of them.

Art that inspires me:

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, in his 2017 Nobel prize acceptance speech.

Kesra Hoffman
Light Through The Window, Sunset 1, Nimrod Hall, VA 2019
Acrylic on board. 12 x 9 inches

This is out of Kesra Hoffman’s usual grand landscape milieu, but it’s exactly the kind of painting I’ve been interested in lately. I love paintings that are all about the light. If you love this painting the way I do, she’s selling small prints of it in a set of postcards for $12.

This painting by Henry McCausland, which he posted quite mysteriously without a title or dimensions on Tumblr. I haven’t painted plants or greenery in ages, and I’m itching for it. Everything is so green here in Iowa right now. Fields and fields of blooming clover. It smells amazing.

These poems are friends.

Edouard Vuillard
The Flowered Dress 1891
Oil on canvas. 14 x 18 inches

Green, brown, gold, and a hint of pink. It took me a long time to notice the mirror in the background. 

Leon Wyczółkowski
Spring – The Interior of the Artist’s Studio 1931
Watercolor, ink, chalk on paper. 

I can feel the breeze. I’m obsessed with windows. Seems like lately, everything I love is green. 

I hope next month I’ll have some green paintings of my own to show you. There’s a cottonwood tree outside my studio that’s calling my name; my goal this month is to finally try plein air painting.

Thank you for reading. I hope this was interesting to you.

Sincerely,

Ruby Walker