Ruth Bauer

Big Sky is a stop motion collaboration between Ruth Bauer and Blyth Hazen. This animated short is a coming of age story about a young artist living in Texas in the 1960s. Both Ruth and Blyth grew up in Texas, and both left as young adults. But Texas never left them. The characters and the stories in Big Sky are amalgamation of their own childhood experiences dealing with religion, race, beauty, the landscape and horned toads.

Edna’s Beauty Salon, the first of seven scenes in the film, is under production and shooting began in summer 2022.

Updates on the progress of Big Sky can be found on Instagram #bigskystopmotion.

Making collages has always been part of my artistic practice. At this stage of my life, I have an ever growing accumulation of ephemera: old drawings and watercolors, letters, postcards, postage stamps, old field guides, scraps of interesting paper and fabric, photos, maps, souvenirs, and more. I am working on a series of collages titled “Ephemera”, reassembling all sorts of bits and pieces from my life. The collages will also be seeds for oil paintings . During and after World War 1, artists of the Dada movement made collages as a way to “reassemble” pieces of a world they considered broken, using found papers, and magazine and newspaper cutouts.  Given the current state of the world, the idea of recycling/ recombining old debris together in a new configuration is particularly appealing.

Here are images of new work in my studio, from a new series of small watercolor paintings and prep on a canvas for an oil painting based on one of my ephemera collages.

Like everyone else around the world in March 2020, I was at home and feeling completely unsettled as I tried to navigate Covid and an upside down world. I began this series of botanicals as a coping strategy, losing myself in the intricate details of one plant on a blank page. I now have a wall of these small watercolors and have expanded into ferns and fungus, soon to be posted. I don’t know exactly where this series is leading, but the botanical source material is endless.

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the west and south.  It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville Moby Dick

"Kokovoko:  The True Story of my Life on a South Pacific Island” is an ongoing art book project set in the mid-19th century and is the fictional diary  and nature journal of Charlotte Fulleylove.  Charlotte, a spirited young woman and amateur naturalist travels to the remote South Pacific Island of Kokovoko, the mythical home of Queequeg, the charismatic cannibal from Herman Melville's Moby Dick,  to study the flora and fauna there. Watercolors, collages, oil paintings, and written narrative are part of this long term series.

"Kokovoko:  The True Story of my Life on a South Pacific Island” is an ongoing art book project set in the mid-19th century and is the fictional diary  and nature journal of Charlotte Fulleylove.  Charlotte, a spirited young woman and amateur naturalist travels to the remote South Pacific Island of Kokovoko, the mythical home of Queequeg, the charismatic cannibal from Herman Melville's Moby Dick,  to study the flora and fauna there. Watercolors, collages, oil paintings, and written narrative are part of this long term series.

I had an opportunity to travel to Mexico in 2007 thanks to the largesse of a travel grant from the school where I teach.  It gave me the opportunity to be immersed in the art of a culture that has fascinated me for many years.  While I had admired many Mexican artists of the twentieth century, I was unprepared for how effected I would be by the blend of indigenous Mesoamerica with the Spanish Baroque.

In my paintings over the years, I have been preoccupied with the play of sunlight and the purity of geometric forms to create spaces for my viewers to explore, stage sets of places both imagined and real.  Mexican architecture has the quality of being open and enclosed at the same time, with vistas that look both inward and outward.  I felt as if I had wandered into one of my own paintings, or a painting that I wanted to make.  Mexico is a painter’s paradise; the quality of the light and dry atmosphere, the vivid colors and smells, and the ancient ruins side by side with sixteenth-century cathedrals are a heady mix.

 I call this exhibit Fantasmas Antiguos or "old ghosts", to evoke the layers of Mexican history, with its deep contrasts and dark passages, that were in evidence everywhere I went.  Ivan Zafra, my insightful guide in Oaxaca, explained to me that the cathedrals were built and decorated with the labor of the indigenous people with Spanish overseers. He pointed out that the faces in the frescoes often had the features of the Zapotec people who made them, not the Spaniards; and that the visual motifs of the indigenous people were fused with the Catholic iconography. That synthesis is powerful and poignant, and it’s effect is haunting.  Visiting the studios of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera deepened my sense of the past and present melding together. It was moving to see their brushes and crusty palettes, and their worn shoes molded by their feet.  Kahlo’s joyful spirit and physical suffering is felt throughout Casa Azul, her home that has doorways into her lush garden from every room.  All of her earthly belongings are there: paintings, playful folk art, childhood toys, her wheelchair by her easel and gaily painted body casts – as if she had just stepped out for a moment.  Now my memories of my travels in Mexico have become my own theater of the imagination, with all of its lights and shadows.

The "Republic of Dreams" series of oil paintings is inspired by the Polish author Bruno Schulz, in particular his essay "The Republic of Dreams".  Schulz, described by American writer John Updike as "one of the great transmogrifyers of the world into words", constructed a potent and evocative universe of personal myth and imagination.  Like Emily Dickinson, Schulz led a private and intensely creative intellectual life.  His death during the Nazi occupation of Poland is a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of the delicate and beautiful Republics he imagined and brought to life.