Written by Zoe Worth
From nostalgia for Shropshire to her treasured postcard collection and boyfriend Jesse Grylls. Ruby Read reveals her inspiration, past and present, confronting the thornier question of what her art means.
Portrait of Ruby Read, shot by her brother
With a sweet plummy voice and dirty blonde bob, Ruby isn’t the prickly artist one would expect to meet. She is constantly apologising for getting distracted by things and is very casual in her manner, at one point sitting with her knees up. Her three favourite films are Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Matilda and The Sound of Music. She said it was met with an icy reaction when she reeled them off at the Chelsea Arts Club however, she doesn’t really care. With a twinkle in her eye, she asked me whether I knew that Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Such a cherished classic should be taken seriously, after all, it shares an author with Bond.
Old Hitchcock-esque Hollywood glamour, Andy Warhol, Emilio Villalba and Paula Rego are referenced as her influences. ‘The Cadet and His Sister’ is a painting that shows a sibling’s farewell rippled with tenderness and regret, which she found particularly striking. These influences trickle through her work, expressed through her signature ‘impasto’ which gives her the liberty to ‘sculpt’ the icing-like paint and play with form.
Ruby comes from an artistic family with her dad as a clock designer while her grandparents were antique dealers, she has always been surrounded by old and new with her house having wacky trinkets everywhere. “Every kind of clock”, she laughs. Growing up in Shrewsbury, Ruby has a fondness for the beauty of Shropshire, and its rolling hills, which is elegiacally found in her postcard collection.
‘Lola’s lucky number’ is a sweet ode to her little sister, she later shows me her talisman: a silver ring with the number 23- her birthday. She collects vintage postcards wherever she goes. Paris, Greece and Shropshire. She paints over them, partly because she always needs something creative to do and also because they are less ‘scary’ than a blank white canvas. She tells me, starry-eyed, that the charm of vintage postcards is that they are often written on with messages and addresses.
Ruby’s paintings seem to mirror this dreamy femininity with floral motifs and romantic tones– she only really paints women except for an old male friend and somewhat muse. She laughs, telling me that her boyfriend asks her “Why do you keep painting him?”. She flippantly says that she thinks he has an interesting face. Jesse Grylls and Ruby met in the building of their Battersea flat and have since collaborated on paintings. ‘Pink Peonies’ utilises Jesse’s edgier street art abstract style with blue tints that have Ruby’s signature florals painted on top. She says she was surprised about how well it worked but is sort of rolling with it.
Pink Peonies. Collaboration with Jesse Grylls
When I ask how she is influenced by the girls in her life she pauses. “My paintings are not overtly feministic”. They are more concerned with telling individual, often tragic stories with real fatalism and sensitivity rather than satisfying this lust for shoehorning political meaning. “This is the male gaze” or “This means…” It was freeing when one of her tutors addressed the speculators and told them “I don’t think it is".
Ruby says the women she paints were “fetishised as beautiful and glamorous- but they were suffering”. She paints the misery that troubled many starlets’ lives- this underbelly of iconography. They are far from passive though with canvases being sometimes over 2 by 2 metres exerting dominance. ‘Self-Portrait as the Most Beautiful Suicide’ is a poignant hymn to the iconic photograph of a woman who jumped to her death from the 86th floor in New York and fell on a taxi. There’s this enigmatic strangeness as she lies there “unmangled” with her beauty immortalised- like she’s sleeping, Ruby says.
Brigitte Bardot, the smoky and sultry French actress, is painted in an electrifying cherry red. She secretly struggled with self-destructive depression that was lost in the fog of fame. Women have this essence of beauty and elegance but also an enigma. There’s this sadness in their eyes that is so moving and opens the door slightly to the misery that troubled many starlets’ lives.
These beautiful spectres are haunting in all their tragedy and fragility. They succumb to voyeuristic, and often brutalist, gazes that chain them to the ‘femme fatale’. The ‘movie star’: Edenic in her beauty, hellish in her sexuality. But she is ultimately desired and nothing more. Ruby doesn’t flirt with ‘pretending’ to stage philosophical and political protests through her art. Nevertheless, they tell stories which are above all else, moving and arrestingly personal. What could be more important than that?
Brigitte Bardot in Red
‘Pruning’ is Ruby’s take on identity and conformism. The act of ‘pruning’ is often seen to symbolise renewal- cutting allows for blossoming. Crack the glass, and you see that ‘pruning’ is a double-edged sword. It becomes an act of sculpting yourself into something or maybe even anything. It’s an introspective reflection on how we become something for the sake of others or what society makes us think we want to be.
After two hours of conversation, I asked Ruby how she ‘found’ her style. At school, she was always painting realistically but then experimented to appease her teacher’s push for surrealism. This left her confused with her work. She then painted a self-portrait and serendipitously found that her “style was given again” and has been unapologetic ever since.
The classic question ‘What next’ hangs. She is restless and would like to move to New York City or Japan. Her boyfriend Jesse waxes lyrical about paradisical rural Japan however she is keener to soak up the “crazy aesthetics” in Tokyo maybe taking up a residency in exchange for teaching children.
It seems rare that an artist plays down the ‘meaning’ of their work however, Ruby Read paints because she finds things beautiful, though at times inexplicably so. Even though she tells me she cannot “articulate herself very well”, her paintings speak for themselves.