welcome to brushwork
My name is Ruth, I am a London based Artist. I have created Brushwork to showcase my acrylic paintings. Please keep reading if you want to know more about me, my journey as an artist or just go straight to the gallery to see my work.
If you want to get in touch, please use the social media icons and message me on Instagram or Facebook or email me on ruth@brushwork.net.
about myself
Originally from Germany I came to London in 2004. Since then I have been living in different parts of Hackney, and currently live with my partner in a small flat in Clapton. The dining table in our open plan kitchen / dining room transforms into my ‘studio’ when I paint, much to his annoyance. I have always enjoyed ‘making things’. Sewing, knitting, sketching, life drawing, stone carving and mosaics are some of the things I have tried – acrylic painting I enjoy by far the most. During the various lockdowns I have been spending a lot more time with going out for walks, enjoying nature and finding more inspiration for my paintings. While out for walks in the nature reserve close to where I live, I often take photos of plants and aspects of nature that fascinate me. Sometimes I translate the photos into paintings.
Please visit the gallery if you want to see more of my work.
how it all happened
So, before I started painting I was quite into sketching. I was fairly comfortable with drawing a building (useful in architecture school) or a nude. Black pen was my favourite for life drawing and portraits, but I often got stuck on little details, managed to draw an excellent ear, but completely neglected the rest of the body or didn’t even attempt to tackle the background. So my drawings always looked unfinished, with a lot of white paper.
With painting I find it it is a lot easier to spot the unfinished bits. When I can still see the white paper, I know I am not done.
But even with painting I struggled for a long time, thinking that my paintings never look finished.
Before the pandemic I would sign up for the occasional painting course, usually during January or February when I needed something to brighten up the darkest time of the year. I always finished the course with best intentions to carry on painting at home, but that rarely happened.
During lockdown and especially while on furlough, I suddenly started painting a lot more. My furlough started in April when the weather was still cold and I was sitting at home, painting all sorts of fruit and veg we had at home.
When the weather started getting better, my morning walks through the nearby nature reserve started to be more enjoyable and I took lots of photos of any plant that I liked, always on the hunt for something I would be able to paint.
Even though I paint fairly small, maximum A3 size, the drawings started piling up at home and taking more and more space. My sister asked me a couple of times what I’m doing with all the paintings and I would always laugh and just say: nothing.
creating brushwork
The idea to set up my own website had been in the back of my head for a while. And then I actually started to produce more paintings that I was happy to post on social media and I thought I might as well put them on a website.
Actually I am really not a big fan of posting on social media, but I do like Instagram. I like seeing snippets of other people’s lives and on rare occasions I like sharing a snippet of my own life along with a few hashtags. So when I am super happy with one of my paintings, I post it and surely all the likes and positive comments have hugely contributed to bringing Brushwork to life. This is the first time that I have attempted at building my own website, so it has been a huge learning curve for me. Any and all feedback is welcome! Luckily my brother works in IT and he kindly helped choosing a name and setting up the domain. Then I signed up for a WordPress introduction course at City Lit. The course was really useful to understand the basics of how to start and navigate through WordPress. The journey since the course has been a lot longer than expected and there was a lot more stuff I had to think about. Do I need a privacy policy? And what about copyright? And how do I change the colour of the hamburger button? At many points I thought that I had destroyed the website and I would have to start again, but often it was just one setting I had to change or one plug-in that I needed. I watched several YouTube tutorials to get me back on track. Now, I am very proud to have created this website all by myself! Some advice to an inexperienced person like me who wants to build their own site: give yourself plenty of time!!
scanning my art and printing cards
A colleague suggested I could print cards from my paintings and it didn’t take long until I started looking at print shops on the internet. Turning my paintings into greeting cards needed quite a bit of research and testing – it was more complicated than I expected! I started off by using a photo, taken on my mobile, to get the first card printed. I was actually quite happy with the result. Luckily I researched a few more printing companies and by chance I ordered a sample pack from a print shop in Kent. The quality of paper and their card samples was excellent and they provided quite a lot of information about their work on their website. Part of their service is to scan paintings and proof the scans against the originals. So one Friday I took the train to Kent to drop off 6 of my paintings for scanning. About a week later I received samples of my printed cards and extracts of my paintings printed at original size. The quality absolutely convinced me. Especially the full size prints look almost real, every detail created by the brush is visible, it almost looks three-dimensional and you just want to touch the print to see if it is real. With my limited experience I would say that scanning of acrylic paintings is absolutely worth it.