Ruth Sanderson
I have always enjoyed a challenge and decided to teach myself oil painting when I was around 13 years old. The first thing I painted was a horse head. I took art lessons from a woman in town, but she said I had natural talent and she really could not teach me anything more. After spending a year at a liberal arts college I transferred to an art school so I could take a combination of traditional drawing and painting courses and commercial courses as well. I really wanted to make a living and decided that illustration was the way to go. The fine art scene was also more abstract and did not appeal to me, though I admired older painters like Magrite, The English Pre-Raphaelites and the Hudson River School. The illustrators whom I admired the most were the Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and Mark English.
In 1974 I graduated from the Paier School of Art in Connecticut. An agent in the children’s field took me on and though I did a little magazine and advertising work on my own I soon was busy with children’s illustrations, mainly textbooks, for the first five years. I started to do some full-color covers as well. The books I had read as a child, the Black Stallion series and the Nancy Drew series were being put int
o paperback for the first time and I was fortunate to get the assignment for 18 covers in each series. I did some black and white picture books and an edition of The Little Engine that Could.
Since 1999 I have been doing an occasional personal painting, mostly on themes that reflect the personifiction of nature. The “Green Man” image “came” to me at the turn of the millennium during the computer scare that was going to cause civilization to end. The Green Man is the symbol of rebirth out of seeming death – the eternal mystery of life, and I guess it was my way of symbolically dealing with the fear of The End. I am working on depicting the four seasons as well, using the “Eternal Feminine” as the symbol to carry the idea of the changing of the seasons.
The newest venture is into i-phone Apps. Now children can read along on an i-phone while the narrator reads the story of
PAPA GATTO. Produced by PicPocket Books®, text pages alternate with images from the book. The narration is superbly done. It is available from the i-phone store for only $2.99, and will be available for the i-pad when it is released.
