Spotlight Artist

Ruth Koelewyn

Midwest
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

 My work is currently focused on depicting the shape and character of the sky in a given place. In Detroit, looking out at Lafayette Park, it creates blue crowns around large buildings with open parks surrounding them. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, where I lived prior to my return to Michigan, it was a small triangle of blue seen between tightly packed houses when you looked up past the mountains. At Can Serrat, in El Bruc, Spain, where I worked in residence in 2019, the sky was reflected and fragmented by the dense trees lining the ravine where the residency was located. I am recording these characteristics because the sky, while helping to define a unique sense of space and place, is also something huge, outside ourselves, universal, and ubiquitous. By focusing on the shape of the sky, I am making the sky a thing to hold, to understand, to identify as our own: a part of ourselves.

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