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Aug 21, 2009
Ruth Russell Williams has been called North Carolina's Grandma Moses. Williams comes out of an African-American rural background. Moses, whose real name was Anna Mary Robertson, came from a white New England rural background. Moses was in her 70s when she began to paint; Williams was 45 years old. Neither had formal art training, but both touched the hearts of their viewers because their stories brought back fond memories. They are the true American folk artists.
Currently Williams is being celebrated in her first museum show at N.C. Central University Art Museum. There are more than 50 paintings, loaned by 22 collectors. The opening hummed as her patrons savored their pictures in a museum setting.
Although unschooled in painting Williams has a delicate touch. Her sense of color is flawless and her scenes catch the moment. In the tiny painting "Feedin Penny" it does not matter that the little girl in her red pinafore is just a flick of paint and the chickens are dabs of white with a head of red: We recognize the hen house, the green grass changes hues just enough to look real, and the top of the painting, filled with white fluff and streaks of blue, looks just like the sky. Williams signed the painting "Ruth" in red.
"Mother's Day" is larger and a more complicated composition. The white church occupies the center of the painting. At the front of the building are small groups of women, men and small children. Up close, each figure is just a few flicks of color, but we believe that a bit of red paint and a brown stick is an elderly lady on a cane and the two figures behind her are an older child pulling a younger one along. In the middle distance to the right is the church cemetery, rich green paint strokes for the nearer bushes and lighter greens for the further woods. A few cars of undetermined vintage stand to the left of the church and in the lower right hand corner in bold block letters is the artist's name.
I talked by phone with Williams at length and asked her why she signed some paintings with her full name and others with just "Ruth." "Some of those paintings are so small my full name would take up the whole painting," she said, and with that we began a delightful conversation that revealed a woman with grit, determination, intelligence and more than a little artistic talent.
She told me she never tried to paint as a little girl but when she was seven she told her grandmother, who raised her, "I want to be somebody." Her grandmother did not really understand, but she explained to me, "I meant somebody important. I didn't know it would be through painting but when The Smithsonian Magazine used my 'Outdoor Baptism' on its front cover I knew I was there." In the center of this painting is an azure blue stream with several figures in the water. Three figures carrying umbrellas approach the colorfully dressed spectators standing on the bank. There is no traditional perspective and the figures are not formed anatomically, but we understand the event perfectly.
Williams' painting career took off after her success as a hair dresser, first in Richmond and then in Henderson. "It was tough learning life," she said. She married at 16 and had four children, one after the other. Six years later, she returned to Henderson, opened Ruth's Beauty World Salon and developed a line of beauty products. She married again at 42 and a few years later when her children had left for college and the house was very quiet, decided to try art. Her one painting class was a disaster. "The teacher put a block and ball on a table and told the class to draw it. I didn't paint it the way she wanted; I wanted to do something different and as I left in tears, I promised her, I'll be the artist I want to be."
She checked out art books from the Henderson Library and saw Van Gogh, Picasso and the Impressionists for the first time. "If you want to learn," she said, "you study the greats." Later on, people compared her to Grandma Moses. "I paint differently from her," she said. She went on to explain. "My figures don't have eyes, teeth, or a nose. I have found a way to turn the figure away from the viewer and make the form stand in a certain way and use bright colors and you think it's all there. When I painted a black face grinning, it looked like a minstrel face and I didn't like that."
At a young age she learned to take over her own life; she does the same with her art. With the help of her son Rick, she is her own sales agent and, since 1993, on the first Sunday in October she offers her latest paintings and prints for sale under a tent in her front yard. She has contracted with J. C. Penny and, recently, Roses International to sell her prints and reproductions of her work on plates, cups and T-shirts. She said she makes copies of her paintings accessible, because not everyone can afford an original. She added she sells everything she paints. "I think they buy because they think I'm old and going to die," she laughed. Williams is 77 and dealing with heart problems, but she is still vigorous and very much in charge.
Blue Greenberg's column appears each week in Entertainment and More. She can be reached at blueg@bellsouth.net or by writing her in c/o The Herald-Sun, P.O. Box 2092, Durham, NC 27702.
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