Ruth Kapcia
Ruth Kapcia is a painter who studied at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to engage the viewer, allowing them to explore and connect more personally with my work rather than dictate a specific viewpoint. While some of her imagery might be self-explanatory, other imagery is left to the witness's interpretation and imagination. She has been working with oil pastels since her early days in art school. At the time, it was an easy medium to use. It was portable and odorless. Initially, she used pastels with higher wax content, but over the past 20 years, she has used higher-oil, pigment-based oil pastels, which allow her to build layers of texture and use the sticks as blending tools. She is inspired by the thick use of paint by the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists. She loves the richness and dimensionality that texture provides. Recently, she has explored melting pastels with a heating stylus, developing a stippling technique that creates a 3D texture by layering thousands of droplets. This process creates visual interest both up close and from a distance. In her work, she explores the relationships among color, texture, and motion. Her early imagery was highly expressive, focusing on abstract environments and employing bold, aggressive strokes. Over time, this evolved into imagery with more complex layering of color and texture for a more 3D effect. Her recent work builds up various textures using marks and melted oil pastels. Additionally, she explores how these elements work together (or against each other) to generate energy and produce distinctive imagery.She loves the beauty of the PNW, and one of her favorite things is visiting the Skagit Valley in the fall and stopping at a few of her favorite spots, such as Roozengaards, which has beautiful dahlias—the subject of her newer work. The new series is called Resiliency in Bloom. Dahlias represent the capacity to withstand or recover from difficulties, both mental and physical. They define elegance, grace, inner strength, resilience, creativity, and positive change, all elements needed in the current times we live in.
