Artist Statement

For decades, I have chased the emotional Landscape. Even days that I don’t want to reveal my inner world I have found that the brushes and paint won’t lie for me. Instead, they show me the truth of what and who I am in that moment.

After the death of my husband, John, it was hard for me to paint. Grief flooded my ability to trust myself and create. A helping hand from a great fellow artist guided me back into what I have always known about painting. It is a real and demanding muse. The truth will show herself over and over again.

This is why abstract expressionism continues to pull me, push me and captivate me for endless hours in my studio. Here, I forget time and travel through colors, shapes and lines and journey through my soul. At the end of the day the work will often surprise me, sometimes disappoint but even so, it’s still a very good day.

To tell my story through paint and abstract images is reaching into the other worlds and pulling back the magic, the loss, the gain and the heart of being human. To be an artist is to believe in magic and to release it onto the canvas.

The technicality of abstract painting, essential, like the motor in the fast sports car, it must be oiled and fine tuned, but essentially it is you who will drive the car and it is you who will be on the canvas. One may say an artist hides in abstraction. I say, she is totally revealed.

Ruth Gilmore Langs

Artist Statement

Born 1959

Michigan, USA