This May we have a group show featuring three synergistic artists: Sarai Raven Huber, Margaret Kinkeade, and Ruth Loveland. The show is called “Rock, Paper, Scissors” and opens May 10th during 2nd Friday Art Walk. The event runs from 6 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. at 325 E. Main St. and is open to the public. To give each artist the opportunity to talk about their work and the show, we have decided to break their profiles into three parts.
-Helen Grant
Ruth Loveland
Artist Statement: I approach creation using multiple techniques and media. I use pen drawings, layering and sanding of opaque acrylic paint, gold leaf, photocopy manipulation of original drawings, and acrylic transfers on wood and canvas. Central to my practice is a love for materials, color, and the alchemy of painting. I find that everything I create seeks to attract gratitude, community, love, and relationships which repeat, alter, and multiply the good in our lives.
Q&A
Q. What is your background?
A. I have a BFA from OU and have maintained a studio in Norman since 2005. I have worked as a director’s assistant for a commercial art gallery, and in store artist for Anthropologie, I have created numerous bodies of my own work as well as writing, collecting projects, and ceramics. I am currently represented by Weinberger Fine Art in Kansas City.
Ruth Loveland
Q. Where do you draw inspiration from?
A. Emotional landscapes, repeating themes of magic, loss, community, end of life, nature, mycology, and obsessive natures. I often look to express enthusiasm for different visual representations of portals, liminal spaces, and ways to gather. I am also inspired by the absurd and hiding things that are secretly funny in with themes of overt seriousness.
Q. What are you working on right now that excites you?
A. I have been working on this concept of “Magic Sad” and how you can make sadness turn into magic and how I can incorporate a lot of different material projects under this umbrella. Mixing up Mono-printing, drawing, xylene transfers, and potato printing have really captured my interest. I am also excited about some recent experiments in making paint from naturally occurring clay deposits around Norman, which is kinda magical.
Ruth Loveland
Q. What are you favorite books, movies, or music you’re into right now?
A. I’ve been listening to Future Islands, War on Drugs, and Julia Jacklin. I am re-reading “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Bulter for the third time. I love novels about distopian futures.
Q. Do you have any art events or exhibitions you’re really excited about this year?
A. Showing with Margaret and Sarai at Resonator! The mix of soft and semi-soft and hard fired clay is an exciting mix. We are all mothers who work intuitively, have many demands on out time. and found a commonality to gather our work around.
Ruth Loveland
Q. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like readers to know about?
A. The work that I am showing at Resonator this month is deeply, pungently, majorly personal, but also mostly concealed and wrapped with more formal qualities. The work is experimental and quite different from what I have done in the past. It is a promise on my behavior, on your behavior, on unrest. I explore how the horizon line can save you, pondering over a distance that seems infinite. Even if it is a mirage, and the colors are a little off, it can give you enough space that your misery can expand into something more hopeful. If what seems like red stripe in a rainbow is actually a peeling scab, it still works, it curves, it interacts with light and when inverted it is put on a dare: catch luck or catch dust. About this work: I couldn’t help it and also didn’t mean to, that’s how you know its true.
Ruth Loveland