Ruth Speer
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@septemberwildflowers (instagram)

Happy Sunday friends. I’m thinking about the next book I want to make. I think it would be small, filled with spring and forest thoughts, and able to fit into an envelope with regular postage. If you have ideas of what you’d like to see: leave them here, I’d love to hear about it 🌿 Anyway, that made me want to go through my 2018 book, “there is a magic deeper still.” This is one of my favorite spreads, with the little bit weird, little bit romantic story of a semiaquatic lady that @sylwiaholmes and I dreamed up in Bath, England a summer ago. It was a lot of fun to do the rococo-inspired portrait on the left. also, please tell me what you did today! What kind of tea did you make? Do you have song recommendations? I’ve been playing Fast Slow Disco by @st_vincent and Remind Me by @emilykingmusic, as well as the whole @emmafilm soundtrack. I send you all my warmth and hope that you are doing all right. 💚 Celtic benediction is by J Philip Newell.
Sketches. I don’t know where the leg antennae came from. I was watching Before I Go To Sleep on a recommendation from @jimenareno and drawing and it just happened. (photo reference by Chris Colls.) You know what’s weird? I almost never just sketch for the fun of it. I draw ideas for paintings, sketches I want to make into /finished things/. But I remember when I was little and I’d get a little stack of printer paper and a big flat book to put underneath and I’d just draw whatever, all day long, for the fun of it. Where did that delight go?? Now’s as good a time as any to get back into the habit 🌚🎨🌝
“Greenheart,” oil on wood, 2020, for @archenemyarts 8 Year Anniversary group show, opening next month 💚 it will be available through the gallery, so contact @archenemyarts if you’d like to be sent the collector’s preview ☘️ Technique-wise, a lot of Preraphaelite colors, Botticelli hair, Bouguereau skin tones, northern renaissance landscapes and Victorian botanical illustrations went into the inspiration for this painting. Meaning-wise, it’s about the feeling of disconnection from one’s own body, the experience of derealization, of floating and spacing out; but the new growth, the green life and perspective that can come from that. It’s a wild time in the world right now, so thank you for taking the time to pay attention to art. I’m privileged to have a job where I already work from home and, especially due to the sales of my last print release, I know I’ll be okay for a little while financially as this virus passes through; but others aren’t so lucky, and I want to support my art community by posting resources and ways we can support each other. If you have an important link or helpful list, comment or DM me and I’ll get to as many as I can in my story as the days go on. Even if I can’t reply, thank you for being kind, washing your hands and giving your love, attention and wisdom to people around you, even if it’s through your screen or across the street 💚 . If you’re not subscribed to Poem a Day from Poets.org, I recommend it! this was this morning’s. . When the heavens with stars are gleaming Like a diadem of light, And the moon’s pale rays are streaming, Decking earth with radiance bright; When the autumn’s winds are sighing, O’er the hill and o’er the lea, When the summer time is dying, Wanderer, wilt thou think of me? When thy life is crowned with gladness, And thy home with love is blest, Not one brow o’ercast with sadness, Not one bosom of unrest— When at eventide reclining, At thy hearthstone gay and free, Think of one whose life is pining, Breathe thou, love, a prayer for me. • For Who? by Mary Weston Fordham
Good morning from me and my paint 🎨 I started this piece over again on a different surface, as the other round panel was getting cracks in the gesso (!!) and I didn’t want the oil paint to soak through and eventually rot the wood, no sir. This painting is for @archenemyarts 8 year anniversary show, opening April 3rd 💚 They are the first gallery that exhibited my work and are such an incredible force - the lineup for this show is dazzling. If you’re interested in hanging this painting on your own wall, contact the gallery ✨ I actually prepared this surface back in 2017 (remember when I always used yellow as a base color?) and it’s just been waiting for me to use it. It’s one of those wood panels cut from a tree branch with the bark and moss still intact around the edges, which works so well with the foresty growth mood I’m working with 🌱🌲☘️🍄 The rest of these photos are from a walk & a picnic with @blackteethcreative and @exaspernated. I’ve been walking trails and exploring outside almost every day the past few weeks, watching the woods explode in green and earthy spring smells, and sketching the trees. I always feel better afterwards. “If I had made that morning myself I couldn’t have done better. It was sunny, spring air, but it was that cool, spicy kind that keeps you stopping every few minutes to see just how full you can suck your lungs without bursting. It seemed to wash right through and through and make you all over. The longer you breathed it the clearer your head became, and the better you felt, until you would be possessed to try and see if you really couldn’t fly.” Laddie by Gene Stratton Porter
☘️ I’m pleased to share the finished painting of “Valley of the Shadow,” oil on board, my first piece of 2020. This will be released as a print with @peoplesprints on Thursday, March 12 at 1pm PST 🌿 there will be 50 signed 12x16” prints and a very limited number of full size 18x24 prints, hand embellished by moi 💚 . I always seem to figure out what a painting means as I’m working on it. My goal is always to lay a trail of symbols and visuals that can be interpreted in a lot of ways, like building blocks, to tell a personal story that’s different for everyone who sees it; but the story I tell myself through it usually takes a while to reveal itself. . I began this painting the same month I started therapy. I don’t want to write a lot about the specifics, but ultimately I’ve realized this painting is about two parts of me: my curious, exploring, emotionally honest self feeling anger and grief and joy, and the conflict-avoiding yet protecting part that feels the need to shove all that somewhere far away and space out in order to function. This piece is about the two reaching a truce. The central flower is pink lily of the valley, which can symbolize the return of happiness, and has also been used in religious painting to represent humility. The Latin inscription in the corner says “Ab Initio, Ab Antiquo, Ab Imo Pectore” which translates roughly to “from the beginning, from the ancient (or from ancient times), from the depths of the heart.” . It’s been an extremely rough personal season which, for me, means painting and making art is difficult. But I’ve been going on a lot of long walks and reading and leaning on my friends who are so good to me. I want to thank you, whoever you are, for reading this far and for supporting me and my work 💙 Spring is coming, and new poems and flowers and growing green things. . I don’t want to leave out that the idea for this painting was planted by a letter from @lilyarnoldart in Germany just after I opened my PO box - thank you for the inspiration 🌿💚🌿
these are some thumbnail sketches for a new painting that felt right put together. . When in sadness, a lot of poems feel like they say what I want to say. so this is all I want to say. . ‘Taking Care’ by Callista Buchen “I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.” . Endymion, Book I by John Keats “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
✍🏼 a little process post. When I’m starting a piece I almost always paint the faces and hands first, because I feel like if I don’t get those right I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else. Which is also common to how I deal with a lot of things in life 🌝 I was looking at the flesh tones used by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in his 1889 painting ‘Première rêverie’ - those minty greens and bright peachy reds. More info on when this painting will be released as a print coming soon!!! . “Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to see the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in cold distance. After two southern winters, with roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad, on this lonely naked road, I don’t know what to do with myself.” — D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia
She’s all done ❤️ I’ve been figuring out what this painting means to me as I’ve been finishing it, and it’s just bizarre and wild how my subconscious brain will create these narrative pieces from what I’m going through and thinking about, and I won’t realize till later. It’s like a puzzle I have to unravel. Maybe I’ll explain more sometime, and there’s so much more I can say about this painting, but in the meantime I’m celebrating with one of my favorite poems by Frank O’Hara, “Today.” . “Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they’ve always talked about still makes a poem a surprise! These things are with us every day even on beachheads and biers. They do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.” . P.s. this painting will be released as a print with @peoplesprints soon!!! . P.p.s. about to edit the million tons of footage I took of the process to make into a new youtube video 😌💕😌
🌱🍄🌛🗡☕️ She’s almost finished 👀✨ just feeling like myself with my paints and my stripey coffee cup 💁🏼‍♀️ . Every time I read anything by DH Lawrence it makes me think of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and then I just want to laugh (highly recommend that book!!) but this poem is always exactly right for how I feel this time of year. . ’I wish it were spring in the world. Let it be spring! Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap! Come, rush of creation! ...I want the fine, kindling wine-sap of spring, gold, and of inconceivably fine, quintessential brightness, rare almost as beams, yet overwhelmingly potent, strong like the greatest force of world-balancing.’ - Craving for Spring by DH Lawrence
Good morning 🍵✨🌜my day so far: lemon ginger tea, headphones, candles, phone on do not disturb, work work work. Stretch, change playlist, twenty minute break, rinse, repeat. I woke up to snow this morning. Wherever you are, I hope you speak kindly to yourself today ♥️ . “When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” • Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
🌊🌊🌊 Here is a little video I spent too long on ⚓️ the pirate lady is coming alive nicely. I don’t know why but I’m so sleepy today. Painting this jewelry gave me energy though 💎♦️👑✨ . “I’ve made good friends with the sun and the rain I’ve played with the land and the sea and I hope when they gather at the end of each day each one speaks kindly of me.” - @dallasclayton . 🎶: Suite for Violin by Bughici, performed by Advent Chamber Orchestra