Website:
http://ruthsantee.com
Biography:
"I embrace narrative. After all, human beings are storytelling creatures."
- R. Santee
California based artist Ruth Santee has an out of the ordinary way of cutting to the core of our humanness. Insects, animals and even plants adopt human narratives in her unique compositions of drawing and collage of found papers. Santee creates imagery that could have come from a quirky children's book, while other times they seem more like pages from a secret diary.
Ruth Santee studied with artists David Barbero, Doris Cross, Joel Fisher, Pegan Brooke and Mark Van Proyen. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the University of Oregon/Eugene, the David Brower Center and the US Forestry Service.
Artist Statement:
My work is a mash-up between the inner dialogue in my head and found remnants of paper, torn out sketchbook pages and paint.
Like Surreal cartoons, each work is a stage on which the drawn and the found come together to question our notions of self. Politics, sexuality, depression, feminism and environmentalism are all undercurrents threading throughout my work.
For the past 20 years, paper has been my medium of choice. I usually do not begin a piece with a specific narrative in mind. The narrative of the work usually reveals itself to me. The Gestalt of finding it, embellishing it and refining it, is currently how I think and work.
I live and work in a converted church located in the Central Valley of California. Life for me revolves around my studio practice. It's consistent and obsessive. My studio is the place where I can let go of the constraints that life places upon me. It's the place where I am truly myself.
