Ruth Philo

Biography

My paintings explore abstraction, often emerging from encounters with place and walking. They convey a sensory experience, combining inner and outer worlds. Essentially they are paintscapes of thought, feeling and intuition. The process of painting makes a dialogue focusing on colour, light and surface, the materiality is key. I often work with pigments and binders that feel close to the earth.

I live and work in Sudbury, Suffolk and have a BA History of Art, University of Warwick and MA Fine Art, Norwich University of the Arts.  My work has been selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and Royal Academy Summer exhibition and is in several collections worldwide. I regularly exhibit in the UK and abroad and am a member of Contemporary British Painting.

These paintings combine material and immaterial aspects of the colour blue, exploring this colour with all it’s associations, the blue of skies and seas, eyes and dreams, distance and memory, the blue of the Virgin’s robes, medieval and Renaissance paintings, the blue(s) of music, songs and prayers. The beautiful miracle of a blue sky returning after rain. The way that a certain hue can hit you and bring back memories that you didn’t realise you had. BLUE IS BLUE. Blue is hotter than yellow. Blue is cold. Icy blue. Curaçao with ice. The earth is blue. The virgin’s mantle is the bright blue sky. This is the living blue. The blue of Divinity - Derek Jarman ‘Chroma’. Blue pigments including cobalt blue, ultramarine, Herculaneum blue and mineral blue have been collected on travels to France, Italy, Morocco and Spain. They are hand ground and bound with a resoluble medium, becoming almost like watercolours on fabric. The paintings were made in the isolation of Covid19 lockdown; as I worked they began to reveal their associations the world is blue at its edges and in it’s depths … this blue is the light that got lost. (Rebecca Solnit).

See Ruth’s Lockdown Interview here -