ABOUT
Ruby paints people the way some people eavesdrop, quietly, intently, a little obsessively. Based in London but shaped by a childhood in Shrewsbury, she moves through rooms and streets with her eyes half a step ahead of her body, collecting faces, gestures, oddities.
By 2025, she had finished her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, following a BA from Camberwell College of Arts. Now she is in Margate, working out of Tracey Emin's Victoria House Residency.
People like to call her a portrait painter, which is fine, but it misses something. She paints what gathers around her, faces, yes, but also plants, objects, things picked up and kept for reasons that do not need explaining. She paints them the same way she paints people, as if spending time with them might reveal something they did not mean to show.
The paint itself does not behave politely. It is thick, pushed, piled, sometimes straight from the tube. It shines in places, gloops in others. You can feel the decisions sitting on top of each other. It owes something to the dense, worked surfaces of Frank Auerbach and Emilio Villalba, the bodily weight of Lucian Freud, and the sly, slightly off-kilter humour of John Currin.
Across everything she makes, the world immediately around her is enough. Not in a modest way, but in a hungry one. Faces, plants, clutter, and chance encounters all get pulled into the same orbit. Not arranged, not improved, just held there, thick with paint, a little strange, and very alive.
CV
Born
2002 Shrewsbury, Shropshire.
Education
2025 MA Fine Art Painting, The Royal College of Art, London.
2024 First Class Honours, BA Fine Art Painting, University of the Arts, London.
2021 A levels: Fine Art (A*), Design (A*) and Economics.
Residencies
2026 Tracey Emin, Victoria House Residency, Margate
Solo Shows
2025 Natural Selection, The Gallery, Shrewsbury
Group Shows
2025 An Other Space, IBV Vaults, Park Lane London
2025 Past Meets Present, 15 Bateman Street, Soho, London
2024 Bunny Contemporary, Shoreditch, London
2024 Infinite Possibilities, The Gallery, Earls Court, London
2024 En Route, Southwark Park Galleries, London
2023 Sound and Vision, The Bomb Factory, Marylebone, London
2023 Refraction, Bargehouse OXO Tower, London
2022 Reflection, Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, Shrewsbury
2022 Parenthesis, Copeland Gallery, London
Collections
Travers Smith Collection
Rise Art Collection
Pilgrm Hotel Collection
Press
July 2025 Blowout Magazine, Artists with Something New to Say
June 2025 London Art Roundup Article, RCA Graduate Show 2025
January 2025 Wayzgoose Magazine, Ruby Read
