Ruth Addinall

We are pleased to sell works on behalf of Ruth Addinall. Ruth is a painter and sculptor living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland. She started to paint in her late twenties and has been a professional artist since then, studying in Paris and at the Frink School of Sculpture.

Ruth’s work reflects her interest in the rituals of everyday existence, especially those that connect us with our inner selves; like reading, writing, having coffee or simply being immersed in our own thoughts. Her work conveys something of the atmosphere of these moments, in that they remind one of our essential isolation, but are also moments that we recognise as being common to all. She is very much caught up in the mysterious world of painting (creating images) and the wonderful artifice of it all. Ruth’s figures and their settings are not realistic but stylised to fit her pictorial world. A couple of phrases from ‘Letter to a Woman Painter’ by Max Beckmann describe well Ruth’s feelings about the world of image-making: art as a “disciplined intoxication” and “the fantasy palace of art”, that palace within us which allows us to escape the confines of the external and create new worlds.  She paints mainly in oils on canvas, wood, board & paper.

In her own words: “The most meaningful part of the experience of visual art is often the part that cannot be put into words. One can talk about the subject matter, and my subject matter generally comes from moments of everyday life that I would hope most people could recognise, with a strong undercurrent of reference – homage of a sort – to the family of image-makers to which as an artist I feel I belong.
One can also talk about style: I am fascinated by style and use different styles according to the piece I am working on.”