Ruth Mordecai |
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Ruth Mordecai's work is expressive and abstract and makes reference to landscape, biblical story, figure and symbol. It has a broad range of colors and also sculptural references. Her early training was as a sculptor. This would partly explain the black gestural line in the work. Perhaps this refers to a welded line. Her paintings are comprised of works on canvas and on paper and collages ranging in size from 15" x 11" to 6' x 8'. Ruth attended Bennington College and then received both her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Boston University (BU) School for the Arts in Boston, MA. At BU she majored in sculpture and spent many years working from the figure. She thought that her whole artistic life would be spent with the structural and gestural forms of the figure. But the more her work evolved into gesture...the more abstract it became. Her work is in major public and private collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Wiggin Prints and Drawings Department of the Boston Public Library. The library owns 30 of her works on paper. She has taught at the Boston University School for the Arts, the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln, MA and the Harvard University Ceramics Studio. She has lived in Vermont, Colorado, Maine and Boston, MA. For 25 years her large studio with its high ceilings overlooked the city in Boston's Fort Point District. It was there that she along with 30 other artists founded 249 A Street, the first limited equity artist's cooperative in the United States. Ruth and her husband now live in Gloucester, MA. Her studio is the second floor of her house high on Rocky Neck overlooking Smith Cove. Where she had formerly been a studio artist and worked primarily indoors as a sculptor, she has since 1998 been working as a painter. Her work is refreshed and energized by the view from her studio...by painting outside, by the fresh air, the light, the sea and saltmarshes and by new colors and divisions of space and by an amazing and supportive arts community. "To my mind there are few if any American artists as acutely attuned as she is, or better endowed imaginatively and technically, to address certain issues of real import"..."Ruth Mordecai is exploring in strictly contemporary visual idiom the large and perennial human questions--philosophical and religious questions, the question of the human community and our shared symbols." |
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