PaintingsDIRECT.com

PaintingsDIRECT: Your work is clearly informed by landscapes you experience abroad, particularly in France and Italy. Do you travel there specifically to paint?
Ruth Baderian: My trips to France and Italy have added to my scope of subject matter. I’ve always painted boats, for instance, growing up at the waters’ edge in New York, but now I have the thrill of expanding my emotions of other boats and feeling huge expanses of rolling hills and farms of a different culture, with a new twist on old themes.

My trips abroad have been especially to paint. Sightseeing is only a means to that end, and that is to express my feelings with a new vigor in paint. A sketchbook is a close companion at all times, just to ‘play’ with new ideas or shapes, and emotions. Maybe I can extend that thrill of being there longer if I mentally touch the area with brushmarks, and then share it with others who see my painted thoughts and feelings.

Trying to find the visual thread that links our universal feelings is a consuming passion, searching for the thread of involvement that ties us all together. Expressing it in sheer beauty is my goal, because beauty heals the soul.

Hilltop Village -- Tuscany
(1999)

Castle Terrace
(1999)

Tuscany Fountain
(1999)

PD: Can you talk a little about the scale of some of your works? Some are as small as five inches square, even though they are richly detailed and beautifully colored. This is kind of an unusual size to work with.
RB: The size of my work varies just as every other aspect of my work. Every size has a special magic. Mini’s are little jewels and very often are ‘field studies,’ if they flow off the brush easily. Sometimes the subject tells me what size it needs to be, sometimes the scale has to fit the broad statement of the theme. For practical reasons, I work in sketch books on my trips, filling them with all sorts of drawings and watercolors on a whole range of subjects, and then at home I can enlarge the images to fit my emotional state and to express my ‘story’ of how extraordinary the subject is and that it must be seen and felt by all!

Interview continued...
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