Ruth McLees - Figurative Painter
Ruth McLees is an artist and collector. Her new figurative paintings combine imagery and objects seen, remembered and collected during urban journeys.
Throughout 2007 she embarked on a number of short journeys around her hometown of Cardiff, South Wales, observing and collecting along the way. Each exhibited painting is a visual and physical record of one of these trips.
Ruth travels with the purpose of seeing and gathering all kinds of small details, some of which are later recorded in her works. Each journey is recorded mentally as a series of events compressed to form the entire experience. She draws together images seen along the way in shops, on billboards and discarded papers. These are combined in Ruth’s trademark style with fabrics and patterns found, donated or bought en route. Translucent forms weave amongst richly patterned fabrics, emerging and re-emerging before the viewer. Experimental developments see transparent layers dissolved into unreserved blocks of colour.
It is never just one fixed view or one found object that makes up the whole painting, but a sensory mix of many complex elements from urban life. Together they act as a memory aid; a visual record of elements from the journey plus a physical record of tactile experience encountered along the way.
Ruth McLees has exhibited widely throughout Wales and the UK with a number of sell-out shows to date
