Nicholas Ruth
Watch This Space Ila, 2019, screenprint, colored pencil and marker, 26 x 20 inches
“I am looking for ways to make work that expresses my experience of life as fundamentally paradoxical, an unsolvable riddle.”
Nicholas Ruth is an artist living and working in Rochester, New York (USA). His approach to color is based on the premise of compelling tension, and his approach to printmaking is materially driven. Nick’s luminous and surreal work is created with monoprint techniques, along with screenprint and installation. Currently he is working on pasted wall installations and a series of intaglio prints with Mirabo Press in Buffalo, NY.
Where do you reside between technical and intuitive in your work as an artist using color?
Even when I plan, I ultimately end up approaching color intuitively, because I don’t have enough technical mastery to nail what I might have dreamed up. This is probably a good thing, because I have to look very hard at whatever actually turns up, take it at face value, struggle to understand it, and figure out how to bring it alive.
I’m not trying to romanticize clumsiness, but more to say that I know what kind of feeling I’m after. I can’t get there by formula, so I depend on my intuition to steer me toward choices that unlock the light inside the color.
“Because I am so moved by luminous color, it’s possible that my use of color helps prevent the tragedy from overwhelming the comedy.”
Just For You, 2017, monotype and colored pencil, 30 x 22 inches
Now This I, 2018, jigsaw monoprint, 14 x 11 inches
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
Printmaking processes are a means to an end. For me, that end is dual: luminous color and a clarity of drawing. I had been struggling to find my footing in my paintings, partly because I was using a brush and therefore every shape was built of lines. I felt like my color was stuck to all that texture. Then I saw Karen Kunc do a demo, and the possibilities unfolded in front of me. To have the drawn clarity of stencils in conjunction with broad fields of luminous color built through highly transparent layers of ink made it possible for me to complicate light and space in a way that felt real and right.
I am often fighting a bit with the processes I use. In my monoprints, the hand-cut mylar stencils I make are misery to handle. I print big fields and end up with shimmery push. Brayer marks appear magically, taunting me. However, it is also the case that many of the unplanned and initially unwelcome aspects of my prints have the effect of creating just that small amount of noise that catches the eye at the surface.
All of this, happening through successive layers, is important to how I use color in my work. Saturated color pushes forward in space, is deep because it is transparent, and is at the surface because it has another body through moments of texture.
How does color represent or support the mind space of your work?
I like this question because it seems like it could be taken in so many directions. I am looking for ways to make work that expresses my experience of life as fundamentally paradoxical, an unsolvable riddle. Therefore, as a picture-maker, I’m interested in visual experiences that present compelling paradoxes.
Color, in tension with drawing and content, is both near and far, compressing and expansive, and is the key to an unfolding set of formal relationships that make the picture worth looking at in the first place, and over and over again.
Color is also a way for me to connect to the surreal. Although I don’t like or look at much surrealist art, I’m drawn to the premise of juxtaposing unlikely things, of having more than one thing be true at the same time. So, using color in unexpected ways in the context of work that is also organized through representational drawing contributes to the set of more or less simultaneous and conflicting ways that the work can read.
These formal, visual systems are intended to animate an equally unsettled set of images about human communication in landscapes with no people. Because I am so moved by luminous color, it’s possible that my use of color helps prevent the tragedy from overwhelming the comedy.
Rte 14 Heading South, 2020, monotype and relief on kozo, magnets and nuts, 56 x 52 inches