Artist, Ruth Smith sees giving back to the community as an important aspect of living life

(My September 2011 Column in the Ajax/Pickering News Advertiser)

With a lengthy professional career as an artist in full swing, Pickering’s Ruth Smith has, in recent years, managed to find time to use her creative gifts and her training as a personal support worker and art educator to teach art to children for a local school board and to mentor and provide art instruction to the disadvantaged at a Toronto resource centre for the homeless. This kind of giving back to the community is a very important aspect of her career as it has evolved, adding meaning and gratification to an already full and busy life.

Smith’s path to the realization of full creative expression has been an arduous one. Born in Scotland, she moved to British Columbia with her family when she was a child. She recalls being regarded as gifted, artistically, but, being shy about her talent, she mostly created magical worlds, literally, in a closet, on reams of computer paper her dad would bring home from work.

Bucking the more conventional aspirations of her parents, she studied fine art at a college in Nelson, B.C. and began making art. Then moved on to Calgary and studied mechanical drafting and worked at various low-end jobs to get by. In the mid-nineteen eighties she moved to Brampton, Ontario and worked as a T-shirt designer before eventually landing a job creating point-of-sale material, work she still engages in to the present time on a freelance basis.

Smith creates bold and simple watercolour paintings of flowers, large format acrylic on canvas portraits and serigraph prints that show a penchant for montage and assembly. Earlier difficult times in her life contributed to periods of creating “darker” works with abstract and surrealistic themes. But a breakout large-scale self-portrait as a bride signified a new beginning with more colour and a more positive outlook on life.

Smith is excited about a new series of portraits of mixed race native Canadians she has started (and is looking for subjects). A solo show of her work is on view at the McLean Community Centre until August 8. As well, she has work on view at the Silverstone Gallery in Pickering where she participates in the artist-on-the-porch presentations.