About Ruth

My art training started in the commercial field in the heart of the 1926 depression. I freelanced and painted nursery rhyme pictures in modern dress and children’s portraits. In middle age I studied fine art under masters: John Howard Sanden, New York; Fred (Fredden) Goldberg, San Francisco; Carl Lundberg, De Young Museum; Neven Kempthorn and Martin Levin.

San Francisco, the city where I was born, touched my heart and it became a theme for many of my early traditional works. It is also woven into later paintings of different genres.

When outer space mysteries were being unraveled and plans were being made to go to the moon I let my imagination fly free, and that became my Cosmic Consciousness period.

As an admirer of Salvador Dali, I began to see concrete things in my free-form works and my paintings became Cosmic Surrealism, followed by a phase dubbed Atmospheric Nautical, drawn from my tropical travels. These paintings are watercolors, done with soft pastel like colors, a major departure from my oil and acrylic paintings.

While living aboard my boat in San Diego, California I shared an art studio with George Walker in the Spanish Village Art Center. Later when living in San Mateo, I became a charter member and studio holder in the Twin Pines Art Center, in Belmont, until we moved up the street and changed the name to 1870 Art Center.