Ruth Bauer

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.

The Kokovoko project is a long-term, ongoing art book project, "Kokovoko:  The True Story of my Life on a South Pacifice Island", in which Ruth is writing and illustrating the fictional journal of Miss Charlotte Fulleylove, a spirited young woman and "naturalist" from the 19th century who travels alone to study the flora and fauna on the remote South Pacific Island of Kokovoko, the mythical home of Queequeg, the charismatic cannibal from Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

The drawings, watercolors, and collages in the Kokovoko series are to be those created by Miss Fulleylove for her journal.

The Kokovoko project is a long-term, ongoing art book project, "Kokovoko:  The True Story of my Life on a South Pacifice Island", in which Ruth is writing and illustrating the fictional journal of Miss Charlotte Fulleylove, a spirited young woman and "naturalist" from the 19th century who travels alone to study the flora and fauna on the remote South Pacific Island of Kokovoko, the mythical home of Queequeg, the charismatic cannibal from Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

The Kokovoko oil paintings are separate and distinct from the artwork to be included in the fictional journal.

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.