Artist Statement, Ruth Buchanan

Ruth Buchanan is an internationally recognised, award winning artist with a focus on equine and figurative painting. Her work explores the symbiotic, societal and healing relationships between animals, especially horses and their human companions. These are drawn from personal experience and memories, and expressed in artworks from her studio in Yorkshire, UK.

Ruth’s work is informed by a study of anatomy and biomechanics and underpinned by habitual life drawing, both human and equine. Her previous career in Graphic Design and Illustration gives her work a structure based on classical principles of drawing which are overlaid with a more impressionistic approach in paint. Ruth employs animals and background elements as allegory, symbols and expressions of emotional or mental states that is indicative of the shifting state of memory. The result is a layered narrative that gives a contemporary take on the tradition of sporting art.

“I love music, film and literature that work on many levels. In using that approach in my work, I want to inspire the viewer to their own conversation with the artwork - one that they may return to many times.”

In demand as an approachable and inspirational mentor, Ruth has led drawing and watercolour workshops internationally as well as in the UK. She has also been commissioned to write articles for Art magazines in the UK and the USA. Ruth's book Hoof, Hide & Heart, a collection of eleven articles on drawing and painting animals originally published in The Artist magazine was published in September 2019, and her work features on the cover of The Yard, by Grace Olson (June 2022).

Ruth exhibits at International Horse Shows and Events, and in National and International exhibitions. She undertakes a limited number of commissions each year, and her work features in the private collections of notable names from the spheres of The Arts and Equestrianism in the UK, Europe, the USA and the Middle East.

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Associations

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Society of Equestrian Artists

Full Member (promoted 2016)

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Institute of Equine Artists

Signature Member (promoted 2016)

International Watercolour Society, British Isles

Association of  Animal Artists

Member and previous committee member