“There is a pure joy in playing like a child who does not need to look over her shoulder to see who is watching,” said Joanne Beaule Ruggles, describing her artistic process.
Ironically, the content found in most of her figurative pieces is anything but playful.
“Unfortunately, many visual artists believe they must limit their art to sweet, pretty, idealized, or romanticized themes,” Ruggles told the Sun. “I do not buy that idea, feeling it relegates visual artists to being nothing more than fluffy entertainment—an equivalent to an organ grinder’s monkey.”
Like most of Ruggles’ exhibits, her latest—Pilgrimage at Allan Hancock College’s Ann Foxworthy Gallery—isn’t afraid of causing discomfort, while featuring pieces that explore rage, sorrow, and loss associated with cancer, terrorism, environmental disasters, and other heavy topics.
“Art can certainly glorify a subject, but it also has equal duty to instruct, inform, heal, chastise, comfort, and edify,” Ruggles said. “I have long been committed to portraying the full range of emotions and life experiences via my artworks. Yes, I have also used my art to speak of beauty, joy, and happiness—but not to the exclusion of the rest of the 360 degrees of life.”
A Central Coast local, Ruggles was a former lecturer at Hancock teaching night classes in life drawing from 1971 to ’76. The artist began her long career at Cal Poly SLO in between that same period, working as a professor in the school’s art department from 1973 until her retirement in 2004.
Pilgrimage marks the artist’s return to Hancock, an appropriate venue to help symbolize her career as a whole, she explained.
“Traveling down this particular road for me has been a pilgrimage of over 50 years,” Ruggles said. “And I feel privileged to have had this career.”
More than the acrylic paint, charcoal, or ink Ruggles used for each featured piece, the local artist frequently found the collaborations with her models to be the most essential elements in completing her work—describing the act of trust between a model and artist a “spiritual experience.”
“What the artist learns is not simply the anatomical structure of that specific human body, but more importantly, what it is to be human,” Ruggles said. “It is from my models that I’ve learned how to see the nuances of sorrow, or exhaustion, or alienation, and many more human emotions.”
The new exhibit showcases many of Ruggles’ expressionist paintings and ink sketches.
“One of the goals I have for our gallery is to bring art to the college that feels approachable, accessible for all, whatever your background. We want people to feel drawn in, and engaged with the art,” Laura-Susan Thomas, director of Ann Foxworthy Gallery, told the Sun. “Many of [Ruggles’] works contain a commonality in the messages behind them that we can all connect with.
“We can allow ourselves to remember a time or place in our own lives where we may have had similar emotions,” she added, “and we connect so strongly with what the subjects in her pieces are feeling.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is a model … citizen. Reach him at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 19-26, 2019.
