Twelve Soaring Panoramas Sprung from Ruthellen’s Palette
The following paintings are a brief and demonstrative gallery of Ruthellen’s accomplished portfolio. It’s a legacy of panoramic majesty. It’s also highly personal. Her vision of the desert grandeur she would call home in the second act of her prolific life.
The capturing of these cascading canyon waters marks a return to oils. Oils were Ruthellen’s first medium of choice from her days at Pratt Institute in the late fifties. Like many young women at that time, she cut short her art education and practice, assuming the homemaker role for the decade to come.
From Monument Valley, through to Canyonlands, and onto the Four Corners, Ruthellen paints here with a vibrancy that stands up to the elevated glare of the high desert sun. Only an elevated celebration of color would stand a chance and both of these competing elements are at play here.
This abstracted landscape is an expansive and improbable panoramic celebration of a Grand Canyon-inspired pastel. The shapes are a throwback to the intensive one-line pen-and-inks she did in the early seventies. The salmon caves and ginger-tinted pathways are hypnotic, inviting us on the journeys to come.
The expanse of Monument Valley beckons us to broaden our biggest of pictures from the valley surface to the sunset pigments of the Utah prairie.
Ruthellen’s landing strip between The Four Corners and the mountains basking in the afterglow of her genius colors and deeply soulful overtones.
A colossal undertaking with a textured elegance and an ascendent vision fully realized. The pinnacle of balding peaks huddling in the lush thickets of the dense and powerful forest.
The passions that fueled Ruthellen’s advocacy for her students spilled into her own work as well. Here we can see the glint of the full desert moon set against the dusk of a near lunar landscape of crevices rising from the canyon floor.
One of Ruthellen’s go-to color choices was a deeply rusted glazing of earthly reds and browns. These palette choices grew both wild and refined in her desert works. Here the decorative coating of darker orange hues are complemented by chartreuse green, perhaps inspired by the oasis of her own garden in Blanding.
It was unusual for one who colored outside the lines to even acknowledge their presence. But here the familiar canyon rock face is bracketed by a post-expressionist pulsing of line-markers. The result is less constraint of brushstroke and more a sculpting of rippling contours.
Although not her primary medium, there are painterly elements of watercolor in this mountainscape anchoring a choppy, blue harbor. The moody sky buckets the simmering turbulence of both a buoyant earth and restless waters.
Ruthellen took her first European trip in 1982. The lily ponds and flower clumps of Monet’s garden in Giverny laid the groundwork for the dazzling colors and dancing reflections that underpin many of Ruthellen’s landscapes prior to her life in Southeastern Utah. Here you can see the rapture she felt in her reverence for the Impressionists:
Claude Monet did not like organized nor constrained gardens. He married flowers according to their colours and left them to grow rather freely.
Givernet, Non-for-profit Organisation
Ruthellen never shrank from new challenges; especially the unchartered territories of integrating several mediums in a single expression. Here we see the interplay of colored pencil and her expressive, sweeping pastels.