Ruth Morrow

Ruth Morrow has spent the past 25 years painting and photographing the beauties of the Mother Lode. Ruth’s loose and fanciful painting style is visible in her watercolors, acrylics, collages, oils, and mixed-media pieces.

2011 has been a busy and gratifying year in her art endeavors. At Sacramento Fine Arts Gallery, Ruth received an award of excellence for her watercolor “A Close-Knit Village” and the Olive Schymid Memorial Award for her piece, “Spring at the Old Homestead”.

She received multiple firsts and seconds at the 2011 Frog Jump Professional Art shore. “Spring at the Old Homestead” also received a second place at the Mother Lode Art Show in October. “High Country Fall” garnered an honorable at Mistlin Gallery’s Spring Show.

Ruth was the first artist to win the Ironstone obsession Poster Contest twice. Once in 2006 with “A Romp in the Hills”, and again in 2008 with “Truckin’ Dills”.

This year was Ruth’s ninth year of acceptance into the “KVIE Art Auction with “The High Country”

For the past three years Ruth has been a member of then the Aloft Gallery Co-op of 40 artists in Sonora. She also belongs to the Calaveras Arts Council, the Gallery Group, the Golden Palette Art Assn., the Mother Lode Art Assn., and the Arts of Bear Valley. In Sacramento, she is affiliated with Sacramento Fine Arts Gallery.

Her work may be viewed at the Aloft Gallery, Calaveras Arts Council in San Andreas, Galerie Copper in Copperopolis, Murphys Grill, Snowflake Lodge, and her studio in Arnold.

As featured artist for October, Judie has many examples of her beautiful work on display at Galerie Copper. She has taught oil painting workshops (“Color Demystified”) in the western states for years.

“It seems that a lot of the fundamentals aren’t being taught any longer, so I designed workshops to address this need,” Judie said.

In her classes, Judie stresses individual instruction in a relaxed atmosphere.  She strives to simplify and clarify the process of expression.

A native of Burlingame, CA, Judie studied at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She has taken inspiration from many great artists, including John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, and Monet. She has studied with such noted artists as Ted Goerschner, Ann Templeton, and Camille Przewodek. Her works are found in collections around the world.

FEATURED SHOWS: (selected solo) Haggin Museum, 5/99, Stockton, CA; Main Street Gallery, Murphys, 6/99, 9/2000; San Joaquin County Arts Council 7/93, 8/95, group invitational 5/96, Stockton, CA; Lasting Impressions Gallery, Carmel, CA 2002.

PUBLISHED:  US ART MAGAZINE 2/98 and “Woman To Watch” 1997, ‘98,’99; Sierra Heritage Magazine, spring, 1998; Get Up & Go (lifestyles) interview, 11/98, collage of her works on the cover of “Gold Country Magazine, 2003; artwork used in “Faith & Family” winter 2004/5, cover 2006 catalog Catholic Heritage Curricula and textbooks; “Valley Views Magazine” interview, summer 2006.

   From late spring until the end of summer, Sunny Sorensen lives in a cabin in the Hwy 4 corridor and paints. She sometimes holds plein air painting boot camps, and now has a summer weekly group in life drawing at Atelier Copper. Her paintings are in several private collections. Her work has won awards and prizes, which she says are stuffed in a drawer somewhere in her studio. About every two years she takes a pastel or oil workshop from a hotshot painter for which she pays a ton of money. At the ragged edge of fall, she flees to Mexico, where she sits in the sun, listens to ranchero music, drinks margaritas, and paints. Here is her story:

   I was born and raised in the SF Bay Area¸ liked to draw as a kid, had no encouragement, was taught how to letter, along with making biscuits, in the ninth grade, nearly failed typing in the tenth grade, got a D in religion, and was told I’d make a good homemaker. Years later, after abandoning the homemaker job (I was a total failure), I graduated with honors in mud and paint from UC Davis—a degree that came with all the breadth requirements. At some point in the mismanagement of my educational career, I wrote my way into a summer scholarship to study art history at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. I stayed two years in Scotland, and with not much discipline, trotted through, and somewhat absorbed, the contents of the great museums and galleries of Europe. When I came back to California, I rode the art train right off the track into 25 years of tin-cupping, glad-handing, writing and schlepping a bunch of Sierra Club waffle stompers through the High Sierra with a packs on our backs—the act of backpacking itself being used for stress relief.

All that ended at the millennium with forced retirement and me with an injured right paw. There was nothing left to do, but stick out the good thumb, and hop back on the train. That’s the way it happened.

What is important to me, is the process of making art. I’ve been messing around with pigments for six years since retirement. Most of what I learned in another life time has come back, yet I don’t like to call myself an “artist,” as I cannot compare my attempts to the great artists of history. You know who they are, or should, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Sorolla and Sargent… Also I have trouble equating myself with more contemporary masterful artists I happen to like: Payne, Dixon, Schmid, Rauschenberg and Diebenkorn. So what I am is a painter, steeped in enough figurative, pop art, and three dimensional brainwashing to be dangerous, seduced by the idea of painting landscapes, and in the sunset of my life, obsessed with how to get it down right (not as in detailed or tight as Richard Schmid cautions against), before I’m back in diapers and parked on the porch of an old folks home.

I firmly believe, seeing (which many of us tend to do poorly) is the nitty-gritty of creating. Anyone can learn the technique of drawing, even painting--the art world is full of “copyists.” But spending a hunk of concentrated time, absorbing a scene or form can move the painter beyond technique, into a realm of visualization, and intimate understanding and feeling for a subject. That’s what I’m after. To this end, I tend to not like painting from photos (though frequently I do it as punishment), which have done all the hard work for me through a one-eyed, pancaked lens. I just don’t get the same thrill from a static photo as I do from studying the nature of a struggling krumholtzed tree, the movement of a model, or a streak of light turning specks of snow into opals. Maybe I’d feel better about the camera if it captured scenes as I remember seeing and feeling them. Or at least played the kind of music I like when the lens popped open.

Mostly how I work is to block in value shapes and use notan to create compositions. I carry a sketch book and try very hard to put something in it each day. Occasionally, I find it very satisfying to whip up a color strewn mess then try to figure out how to paint myself out of it. Maybe it’s the surly politics of our culture pushing this, or just my spotty upbringing. I don’t know.