Ruth Miemczyk: Paintings and Collage

About

Ruth Mienczyk's paintings take shape through a process of adding, eliminating, changing the balance, weight and dynamics. There is a recurrence of certain shapes and gestures; notably the geometric shapes of diamonds, circles, squares and triangles as if the artist somehow constantly needs to probe the visual language, but the resulting paintings emerge as persistent, elusive and wayward as memory.

The artist creates a sense of clarity without destroying the delicate balance which must allow for ambiguity and expansiveness without which their work would lack poetic spark. Her use of colour may seem quite restricted at first sight but offers up its nuances and depths the more we look at the paintings.

The viewer may be drawn to look for associative elements and it’s possible to see how the paintings relate to landscape or architectural structures or spaces. That’s not to say that the paintings are ‘about’ landscape or architecture, or even a specific place or event. While a title such as ‘Winter Moons’ might suggest an atmospheric reading of the work it equally refers to the archetypal geometry and colour within the painting.

Ruth Miemczyk lives and works in Scarborough. She studied Fine Art at Barnsley School of Arts and Crafts and then at Central School of Arts and Design and Goldsmiths College, London. She has exhibited widely across the UK, including as part of the ‘Art in Hospitals Scheme’ during the 1980s. Ruth has strengthened her connections more recently in Poland, where she has participated in several residencies and group shows as well as presenting two major solo exhibitions in Lodz in 2006 and Gorlice in 2003.