Today we’d like to introduce you to Ruby Roth.
Ruby, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I am an artist before anything else. But I’ve found myself in a funny position over the last decade—a product of living in the digital age. I wrote and illustrated the first and leading non-fiction vegan books for children. Really, they were a branch of my art—but they took off, I went with it, and built an audience around them, accidentally becoming a vegan-activist “brand.”
However, I’ve always drawn women, and they came before.
When I was 3 years old, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. I did two painful years of electro-muscle stimulation and 13 years of very aggressive bracing. I lived in a hard plastic back brace 20-plus hours a day for most of my life until I was 19. As a small kid, I was looking at images of my insides and x-rays of my bones and having people touch and talk about my body as if I weren’t there—and so began an understanding that my body was just a vessel; that I am connected to it, but it is not me.
From early on, art was an outlet for pain and frustration while I was cultivating an inner world of senses, though, and discipline. I was particularly interested in the female body, my own. I was in an abnormal container, but I learned to cope: I’m bigger than my body, I’m stronger than my body. This is just the vessel. I suppose, subconsciously, I sought relief through figure drawing, literally drawing up my own idea of beauty, sex, strength, and exaggerating what stood out to me.
The brace created a feedback loop—something on the outside making me pay attention to my insides, making me pay attention to what I put into my body, which made me conscious of my behavior and choices back in the external world. This led me to study alternative medicine, food, the underbelly of the animal agriculture system, social justice and American history through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the invisible forces that shape our society. I was always an activist and always wanted to create art with a purpose. The summation of my personal experiences and interests came together in the children’s books.
People remark how different my subjects are, but I don’t see it this way. My art about bodies and the interior lives of women, the children’s books, my activism and advocacy, they are all related and come from one journey, it is all lines on paper to me. I hope to represent the scope of my work in a more cohesive umbrella as I move forward. I have had enough, you can imagine, with being bound.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My favorite subjects are women’s bodies and our inner lives. I love the beauty and all the meaning of a female body in pose–twisted, stretching, crouching, reaching, women are always telling a story. And there is often more than one at a time: coyness and sass, flaunt and humility, levity and darkness, sex and compliance, self-consciousness and delightful abandon. I find myself stunned (sometimes unexpectedly) at the beauty of a body.
The relief and inspiration I find has helped me come to grips with my own square ribs, dented hips, and old abrasions—battle scars from 13 years of wearing a full-torso back brace for scoliosis. Whether I am drawing from life or from my imagination, my works are filtered through this bodily experience onto paper or canvas. The girls simultaneously inform me and are informed by me. Sometimes I offer them confidence or quiet space, sometimes a moment of shine. Sometimes I live vicariously through their freedoms and adventures, confidence, sorrows, and curves.
Throughout my art education, I have always returned to figure drawing as the root of learning to see, to draw, and to appreciate that anybody can be a source of intrigue and beauty. And so, adoringly, I put down what I find true, exaggerate what I find captivating, and add what is missing or hidden–the “inner life.” Latent beneath the poise of these darlings, in the sharp torsos, caricatured flesh, and pinched voluminous mass, are stories about the inner lives of women.
Any advice for aspiring or new artists?
Don’t wait to start putting your work out there. You don’t have to “arrive” before you were, you don’t have to present a masterpiece, you just have to START. Start somewhere. And your work will ever evolve. Evolution will be your job. Get used to it.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://shop.DrawOrDie.com
- Instagram: @ruby_roth
- Twitter: @ruby_roth
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