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Ruby Roth’s work is defined by the female form and depicts the inner lives of women through emotionally visceral representations of the bodies they inhabit.
For the past several years, amidst a radical transition from a decade of familial life as a best-selling children’s book author-illustrator to self-determined independence as a single female artist, Roth has explored the deep end of the feminine spectrum and its archetypes.
Roth’s work often features solitary women navigating inner and outer wildernesses. In vast emptiness, surrounded by hints of nature, her wild women and “girl gods” find their way through physical and spiritual dimensions of darkness and light, bondage and freedom, apocalypse and utopia, life and death, transmuting nourishing or toxic forces into usable means.
Roth has been a keen observer of the body since childhood, having been diagnosed with scoliosis, which required 13 years of aggressive and painful treatment. Rooted in academic anatomy and pop surrealism, her artwork——often created in live-model sessions——exaggerates and distorts female forms to reflect them as vessels of powerful, feminine processing.
Roth is based in Los Angeles, CA.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host Ken Valente. Editor and producer Peter Bauer.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is the something rather than nothing podcasting I could not be more pleased to have Ruby Roth Here on the show before I always start talking at the beginning of the show because I guess so excited But I'm just gonna let you say hi everybody Yeah, yes nice to reach you I'm
00:00:39
Speaker
out on the coast where I record some time and reaching down from Southern California and I gotta tell you like Ruby like I got so fascinated by
Ruby Roth's Art and Identity
00:00:53
Speaker
You know, when you look in on Instagram stuff and you see like different components and like how it appeals to you and you get kind of excited, I was like. So the exhibit you have, La Luz de Jesus.
00:01:10
Speaker
Museum, I just adore. And the show has had some guests from that gallery. You have an iteration of yourself, an identity, a strong vegan children's author. I've been vegan since 95.
00:01:31
Speaker
I adore your art the the the cowgirls exhibit of La Luca just so thrilling to see the images
00:01:45
Speaker
And hearing a bit about it. It's a gallery I've wanted to be in for 20 plus years. Hell yeah. This was an exciting one for me. Hell yeah. So we both, yes, Laloos, so excited to see that for you. But so there's these things that draw me to you in your story. And as a philosophy show and talking about identity and why we're doing things, I just felt like we were kind of like,
00:02:13
Speaker
thinking the same space, but... Absolutely. I wanted to ask you first off to give a little bit of a backdrop. When did you see yourself as an artist? Is it a process or are you like, I made it here or what? I think it was always kind of accepted in my family that I was the artistic type I was drawing since I was a little girl, since I got my hands on
00:02:43
Speaker
pencils and crayons. So it was clear from the early age that I was going to be in the artistic creative field. Professionally, there's I think crossroads that you reach where you start to feel like you can kind of own that name and own the profession. When I held my first children's book in my hand, the first copy, that was like a
00:03:11
Speaker
feeling of elation and some kind of arrival that this is official now. This begins in an official career. Yeah. Yeah. What about reinvention?
Personal Reinvention and Vegan Literature
00:03:29
Speaker
What about was it late? That's been major for me in the last handful of years, basically since 2016.
00:03:41
Speaker
I left a 14 year identity defining relationship with a man who was my art mentor and whose studio I worked for and whose daughter I helped raise. And I was doing my children's books all through that time, kind of on the side. And those were the vegan children's books. They were the first of their kind in children's literature. Thank you for those, by the way.
00:04:05
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, they became like, I didn't set out to be a children's book author, but they became kind of the go-to books in this Virgin and community around the world. So I kept going and there's five books now. One is a little bit more about emotional intelligence and managing our inner life. But when I left that relationship in 2016,
00:04:29
Speaker
I wasn't a mom anymore suddenly and I wasn't packing lunches and I wasn't doing kid stuff and I had to figure out how I was gonna make it on my own. And I started to bring my personal art to the forefront at that point, which was what it had always been since I was a child, just feminine figurative work centered around the body. And being in the digital age,
00:04:57
Speaker
I confronted problems with algorithms and audience and the way people want you to be distinct in one area and God forbid you change. It's like starting from scratch. So evolution and reinvention has been a big theme for me in the last handful of years and having to be okay with wrapping up an old
00:05:24
Speaker
project, which is a series of five books that got a claim. I was reaching 250,000 people a week in my social media. The books were translated into multiple languages around the world. I was traveling the nation being a speaker and doing media spots on TV. The reinvention part was so personal because I had to kind of wrap that project in a bow and leave it behind.
00:05:50
Speaker
and come to the conclusion that all the acclaim, the numbers, the project, all belongs to those books in the past. And I got myself to a place where I was like, I'll do it again. I'll do it again. I don't even need that audience to follow me. I was trying to kind of like pull some of my old audience along and see if they would come. But, you know, nude figurative art and children's books are the opposite ends of spectrums for,
00:06:19
Speaker
many people, it's all, you know, the same to me, it's all lines on paper to me and it comes from me and one person. So I never wanted to do it under different pen names because it just felt like that was disingenuous. But yeah, the reinvention is still unfolding. And as I find a new audience and find new goals and areas to take this art,
00:06:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Artistic Challenges and Gender Dynamics
00:06:48
Speaker
It's, um, I mean, we'll talk a bit more about it, but I mean, just, I can feel like within that too, just like, uh, trying to figure out what the, like the audience seems like almost an entity for you. It'll be like, you know, trying to figure out probably to a certain point of like, what the heck? I'm the artist. I think some people were offended even, you know, they started seeing nude art and, and probably started flagging my posts too, which became a problem.
00:07:16
Speaker
Now I have five or six posts always that are violating community guidelines just because they're figurative artworks. It's a funny thing and it's a problem specifically of our digital age. Shel Silverstein, one of everybody's favorite children's books authors, The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends. He also illustrated for Playboy and was a playwright and wrote songs that were on
00:07:46
Speaker
you know, top pop 50 charts. So but he didn't have to have a website, you know, he didn't have to make everything cohesive under one brand. So it's definitely these are new problems. Do you think even within that context is a hypothetical shell as a man would have been able to get away with it? Or do you think it was just kind of that visibility bit being able to hide away? I don't know. The same similar thing happened to Tommy Unger, the
00:08:15
Speaker
famous children's book author who was award-winning. And when he started doing anti-war posters that were pretty graphic and got into erotica, took a while for the media to pick up on it. This was also pre-internet. But once they did, they blacklisted him. And his books were burned. His books were removed from libraries. And he was so distraught, he left the country.
00:08:38
Speaker
So it's happened before where people just are not accepting of the artist as a 360 entity.
00:08:49
Speaker
I'm trying to remember now, I'm a big comic book fan, Superman, one of the Superman artists, it was kind of like S&M underground illustrations. And you look a little bit like, is that Louis Lane? It's like, no, kind of looks like Louis Lane's sister. And I think the artist's mind is like, I'm so...
00:09:18
Speaker
Invested like in my head in the artists with like the artists humanity trying to do what they want to do It's something do you a scene there? It seemed to be like let her be human like there was just like peace and ringing in my head at being like what the hell and and the Dynamics, I mean, it's wild that the audience the algorithm if they want you to stay distinct They want you to basically do the same thing over and over down to the color palette
00:09:44
Speaker
You know, for a long in the beginning of Instagram for a long time all the marketing where people were suggesting, you know, create your grid with a cohesive palette. I was like, what? The artist is supposed to narrow down the palette. It's just it's a bizarre. It was our position to be in. Yeah. And in reading about
00:10:08
Speaker
some of you work in advocacy on veganism. I was reminded of a book I read a bit ago, which really just like I was trying to like quickly kind of interpret some of the things I was seeing through it as far as basically sexual politics and what's going on. The book, The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams and
00:10:32
Speaker
Yeah, for me, without getting too far into it, it was this distillation of the feminine in a capitalist society and a famous image for listeners who won't be able to see it, but there's the cover of the book had a what's your cut and it was the female body cut up into pieces like you go into the meat department, right? And so those elements of
00:11:01
Speaker
body, bodily autonomy, the connection of the feminine, the relationship of meat with men. I deal with that.
00:11:13
Speaker
born in 72, became vegan in 95, been vegan more than half my life as a male. People only bugged me, bugged me, but like when I was younger and stuff, like there was definitely like a male type of, you know, a feet type of, oh, no meat for you. Yeah. Well, I've identified that in myself when I first turned vegan. I realized that I was, I
00:11:40
Speaker
was proud to kind of be a tomboy and eat meat with the boys and had to really examine why that was and the politics behind it, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that whole industry is based on female cow bodies.
00:12:00
Speaker
or female chicks, the males are really not usable. So, I mean, there's all kinds of gendered behavior that we all participate in, down to the foods that we eat. Yeah.
Purpose and Impact of Art
00:12:18
Speaker
All right, I want to know up because I want to like remember and hit a couple of the conceptual questions just like the what is what I think the question what is art is fascinating, particularly like with what you're doing, like, you know, grappling with with that question, even with the reinvention. But this is really important to you done it a long time. You
00:12:39
Speaker
I got an exhibit at La Luce. Congratulations again. But what is art? What is this whole thing you're trying to do? It's so different for every person, but for me, I always wanted to create something with purpose beyond just self-expression. For a long time, I didn't really identify with wanting to be a gallery artist.
00:13:09
Speaker
I was more interested in illustration and illustrating artwork that went along with concepts. My senior show in college was way more illustrative than any of the other students in the class. Like they were almost like what you would see going along with a political, an illustration you'd see going on with a political article.
00:13:33
Speaker
And that's what led me into the children's books first because I was teaching art in the after-school program and kids wanted notice that I wasn't eating what they were eating. And I found that there wasn't a book that I could bring in that I wanted to read them. And so I made it myself. And that was the merging of political and art, you know, which was meaningful to me. There was depth beyond.
00:13:56
Speaker
just creating art because I need to get it out of me. But art is also that for me. It's this expression. It's maybe even more than an expression. It's processing. I'm processing my inner world and my experience in the outer world through the art that I create.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I love it. But what's the role of it? What's what's what's what's what's the role of art? I mean, you mentioned that there's some imbued meaning and obviously what you've done like this, it carries some some weight, you know, so it's like, what do you think the role is of art is or and 2024? I don't know. I've looked outside seeing shit seems like haywire and, you know, less stuff going on and climate change and like, like,
00:14:46
Speaker
Don't like like everything has the role of art right now change I Think it's always changing it changes For the artist and it changes for the viewer. I For me in the last handful of years. I've thought of art as A way to remind ourselves of who we are and
00:15:12
Speaker
And it is that for me on my end, as I make real something that I feel, something that I think, that I articulate into physical form. And then I hope that anybody who connects with it or buys the piece is bringing it into their home to trigger a feeling in themselves. And I think that art is so powerful
00:15:42
Speaker
what you hang around your house helps you live. For me, it's not just what goes with the couch. It never has been. I have a woman on a ship. I have a map of the stars. I have a map of the body. And I realized later that
00:16:04
Speaker
the art I hung was not just, it had a way deeper meaning when I realized like the first piece of expensive art I bought myself was this goddess woman on a ship. And I bought it while I was in that long-term relationship. When I got out of that relationship, what I had on my walls were these maps. And there was like a map of the body and all the naughties and the chi energy lines. And it was an 11th century depiction of the Milky Way.
00:16:34
Speaker
And I realized one day, I didn't even know I was buying maps, but it looks like to me, philosophically, while I was in that relationship, I was navigating, I was trying
00:16:43
Speaker
I was driving a ship and navigating. And in this new phase, I was mapping. I was no longer navigating. I had arrived somewhere where I could map out my life. And that was completely subconscious, something I realized coming home from the framer one day and looking around. So having those visual reminders helps bolster. To me, it's like having an altar in your home. When your art is an altar, it helps you
00:17:13
Speaker
Remember who you are, where you came from, and in weak moments the art around you can help you make decisions about your life. They're like reflections of your core values and a reminder. Yeah, what you said had like a lot of meaning to me as far as like going to art and those type of objects because I think
00:17:35
Speaker
I think when I was younger, I had these strong energies throughout my life, but it was like, fuck everything that came before. It's very healthy and good, and most of the time for a certain amount. But for me, it was really starting to understand how things could impact me, how smells could impact me, like you said, a visual.
00:17:58
Speaker
When I've if you're sensitive to painting you look at a painting and it completely like I don't sometimes we sure sure like your DNA and you feel somewhat differently I want to be around that thing or not Yeah, yeah, absolutely the first time I walked into Nikolai Fetchins the fetching house in New Mexico He's one of my my most favorite artists
00:18:26
Speaker
And he was Russian, ended up in Taos, and fell in love with the Native American culture. And now his house there is a museum. And I walked in, and I welled up, and like tears started rolling. And it was, it was, I think the articulation of being around human greatness and potential. And some people come here,
00:18:56
Speaker
and reach their potential. And we're so grateful for them because they make an impact on millions of people for years and years to come. So it's very powerful. That was the first time I understood the footage you see of people crying at concerts. And that really hit me. So yeah, we are energetic beings. We make vitamins in our skin from sunlight, exposure to sunlight.
00:19:25
Speaker
we can pick up somebody's energy walking across the street from them. So yeah, what we surround ourselves with, down to smell even, is important. I think looking at a world that's haywire, it's extra important to help our nervous systems and our senses find refuge.
00:19:46
Speaker
Oh, yeah, what you said. Yeah, like I know it's it's good. It's good to point out like where the kind of wellspring is and where like there's some good. I had the interesting motive experience just recently, you know, with the pain because I was.
00:20:06
Speaker
I was actually out, I do labor work. I'm a union guy for the last quarter century. And I was at a work conference out in New York City. And I ended up at the Museum of Modern Art, which I actually hadn't been in, in New York City. And I didn't know that they had Andrew Wise Christina's world painting. I'd never seen it in person.
00:20:32
Speaker
looked at it a billion times and fascinated by it. Of course, thinking about the body and disability with the main character there. And it's just I can feel it in my body every once in a while. It's like, okay, I happened upon something that I always wanted to do. I didn't check the manuals, but here I am right now. And then with some of those paintings, it's like,
00:20:58
Speaker
And I'm not like with everything. I'm so moved by a painting. It's like looking at the grass and seeing which of the grasses were like scratches and which were like painting going out this way and just looking into like into that world specifically. And I'm like, I was there for like
00:21:16
Speaker
Ten minutes you know it is that feeling where you look around like does everybody know like what this thing is? Who walks by haphazardly don't you know what's here? Yeah, that's the experience for everybody right and he's not for everybody but that experience in a museum where you're like
00:21:37
Speaker
I want to light this painting, which is my biggest problem. I think not everybody gets it. I'm a little bit of a snob, I think when it comes to art and the people I look up to in art history are so skilled. And because I know how hard it is, how hard painting is and where
00:22:03
Speaker
the human potential can get to in the skill. There's a lot of more folk art, abstract art. It just doesn't ever hit me like it does when I see someone who can render a beautiful hand in a few strokes. A hand. And people don't. Yeah. A hand or a foot like Jason Leindecker. I call him six-stroke Leindecker. If you look close, his paintings are
00:22:33
Speaker
like a number of strokes on a simple shape and you have to understand light and value and shape and color and composition and form to make it
00:22:47
Speaker
to make something look so real in just a few strokes versus a rendered photo that looks, quote unquote, just like a photograph is actually not as hard to get to. And I think a lot of people who don't really know about the skills behind what it takes to paint at a certain level think that that's really impressive when something
00:23:12
Speaker
that's to me a few strokes is way more impressive and you know has a read from six feedback and you look up close to it and it's completely abstract up close you can't even yeah it's just a few dabs and a slight variation on the value that gives it gives it form and gives it an edge or a highlight or something is wild.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah. Explain the magic. You can get at it. Yeah. All right. So let's pretend the listeners are around the neighborhood where La Luz de is the gallery.
Exhibit 'Body Work' and Cowboy Culture
00:23:51
Speaker
and your exhibit there, which you're very excited about. I'm excited for your great gallery, great to see your work there. I haven't seen it physically. Visualize, tell us what people are going to see. It's got to be sunny outside first, right? Yeah, this is LA. La Luz de Jesus is one, I feel like one of the older galleries in LA.
00:24:18
Speaker
Mr. Shire started it in the 80s on Melrose and now it's in Los Feliz in Hollywood. And it's a gallery inside this amazing gift shop and bookstore and just has just the oddest ends in it. It's a really fun store. And you walk through the store and all these oddities and you get to the white walls of the gallery.
00:24:42
Speaker
The show I'm in right now is called Body Work, and it's me and three other artists. And my collection on the two walls there are nine sad cowgirls. And they're all solo women in kind of vast landscapes alone. And they came from a love of cowboy culture.
00:25:10
Speaker
for me that reaches back to Kauai in the 1970s where my parents were both living. When they met, my dad was in a honky tonk band and was a country musician. And cowboy culture in Kauai actually stretches back to the 1800s and 1900s when cattle were first brought over. And then Mexican bakeros from California were brought over to teach the Hawaiians how to deal with the cattle.
00:25:39
Speaker
So there's a word, paniolo in Hawaiian is cowboy. And so there's, it's not that old of a history, you know, it's only a couple centuries old, but there's cowboy culture wrapped up in Hawaiian culture. And so I've always kind of been obsessed with the cowboy, the cowgirl, the outlaw. And these particular images came after the end of another relationship. When I got out of that,
00:26:10
Speaker
14 year relationship I wanted something completely different and I this is in my book Boston side which is a collection of journal entries during that time when I left that relationship and got my life back on track I said I want a cowboy from Texas and that's who showed up and As I processed the end of that relationship I started painting these women in vast landscapes who were content in their solitude and lived by their own rules and
00:26:41
Speaker
Most of them are nude or wearing, you know, white clothing with these cowboy cowgirl boots. And so I feel like they're in environments that are like the temperature supports them, the earth supports them. And they are creating solid ground inside of themselves. Thanks for the background on the
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, some history and a love story. Yeah, which island was that again? This was Kauai. I was raised back and forth on Kauai.
00:27:20
Speaker
Gotcha. Gotcha. Thank you for the trip to La La Luz. I always have this struggle that I joke upon on the show. It's like I love, I love painting. I love talking to painters. It's always this audio thing of like,
00:27:35
Speaker
How do we see? How do we see? Yeah, yeah. So in talking about talking philosophy, I want to ask you one of the other big questions, which is either the annoying one or people really, really roll with, which is like in the, in the grand scheme of things, like why we're up to anything is why, why is there something rather than nothing?
Existential Thoughts and Art's Role
00:28:05
Speaker
I love that question. I think that's something I've struggled with before I could even articulate it. I started having panic attacks really early in life. Like I remember being maybe three or four, small enough where my dad could hold me in his arms and I was shivering and adrenalized and couldn't even articulate what was going on. But one of my earliest memories, he took me outside
00:28:33
Speaker
look at the stars as a distraction, and the bigness of the universe made it worse. It's like my adrenaline skyrocketed. I've always felt some discomfort about time and space and being here in this body at this time and we can't get out of it. If nothing is a void,
00:29:04
Speaker
we have to figure out how to fill that void. And as the drivers of our ships, the ones steering our ships, you get to decide so much about your personal reality. So that's something I think is the universe you create for yourself in your mind and in your body and in your behavior and how you live your life
00:29:33
Speaker
every day. Sometimes people get caught up in feeling like a slave to their life, whatever it is, and you need to break out of that. And then some people feel overwhelmed by the freedom that we have in this day and age to do anything you want to do. You can probably figure out how to do it.
00:29:54
Speaker
You know, as I've had, as I've ended some big chapters and started some new big chapters, definitely confronted what has felt like a void and have had to be really intentional and mindful as the sole person driving myself forward about how I want to fill that void. Yeah.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, I throughout and you talking about the body, one of the things that I've discovered as I've gotten older is like,
00:30:30
Speaker
I never even thought about it before. And that's a luxury of being a white male when I was younger, you know, still am, but like, like not thinking about or there's also a disconnect sometimes with, uh, how do I feel this? How does my body feel about this? So like I've had to build up a lot of, uh, language that's been like, uh, very helpful for me. And as I, I, I view it, it connected a lot to, um, being vegan.
00:30:57
Speaker
but also practice and yoga like My body like as a male like in inhabiting and how am I feeling with this emotion and things like that? So um, I just read a bunch. Yeah, go ahead sir. Good. No, I'm just saying it's I think it's a vocabulary or we're all learning especially as the trauma researchers add their knowledge and wisdom to kind of the medical field and
00:31:25
Speaker
how we as humans hold trauma and animals shake it off. We don't have a mechanism to do that or we don't remember. And so we store things in our bodies and there's some bodies that feel obviously more comfortable in this world for whatever reason, social, political, or just personal. And then some bodies that don't. I've always felt very comfortable being trapped in this body and body that had scoliosis
00:31:54
Speaker
body that had to wear a brace for 13 years, 20 plus hours a day. I had a thought very early on, oh, I am not my body. I'm in here. I'm in this vessel that has to be cared for in a certain way. So I've always felt a disconnect. And I think discovering veganism helped me. It was a new form of
00:32:18
Speaker
the way I have to take care of this temple, this vessel that I'm in and helped me feel more comfortable in my body by being what felt to be healthier to me. Yeah, some sort of longer term integration, you know. Yeah, that was...
00:32:40
Speaker
The point I was just going to mention quickly is just an aside. I've been reading a bunch of Kathy Acker, a punk novelist, firebrand. I don't know what she is exactly at the end of the day, but her books and obsession with the body and reclamation and trying to create a narrative out of it so she would
00:33:10
Speaker
rip passages from Don Quixote wholesale, but then start to edit and document them for her, her character.
00:33:22
Speaker
was, you know, ended up Don Quixote. But the reason I thought about it was because there was such a fascinating and aggressive interaction with the body by her as an artist and just with her finding herself within that in a punk, in a kind of a punk, excitable way.
00:33:48
Speaker
But I think in talking with artists and learning about, you know, think about mind, body, right? So this philosophy, I go back to the philosophy stuff, right? Oh, you go to philosophy classes, the body, body rule, the mind, you know, which way is it, that type of thing. But you're always something with like art, philosophy, creating, or just living, that there's this interaction between
00:34:15
Speaker
the body, what the body is, what it's doing, how it's placing itself. And, um, I found that I've been able to learn a lot more over time by like delving into that rather than honestly, I think what a way I was taught was just ignore all that shit. Like personally and just like fucking ignore it until it's like really breaks down. I think it's a disservice, um, that we don't learn, um,
Body as a Spiritual Form
00:34:43
Speaker
We don't all have a shared concept in America. We're all in so many different cultures and religions. We don't have a shared concept of the bodies as a spiritual form. And there's so many different religions and cultures that have it organized. We have a physical body, and then we have a mental body, and we have a spiritual body. And there's some cultures that take even further.
00:35:11
Speaker
even higher levels of etheric bodies, like the auric bodies. And it creates so much more meaning and depth in life when you think about your experience on those different levels. And we don't really get training in that in any way unless you go find it through your own spiritual journey or a religious journey. Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:41
Speaker
I don't know if we really need volleyball in school. We might need some spiritual guidance.
00:35:55
Speaker
I've done union work in K to 12 schools and get the bump into a project, which was a mindfulness project. Like half the grade was doing the mindfulness, the control over there wasn't. Holy shit, guess what you would see on attention tasks, patience, resilience, and just some mindfulness techniques.
00:36:20
Speaker
Well, everyone's losing their mind right now. I argue with someone I know who feels like it's never been a better time to be
Modern Society and Technology
00:36:31
Speaker
alive. And I get that. We have so much technology to support our lives. And at the same time, I feel like there's unprecedented things happening to the human psyche and body and mind that are to feel dark.
00:36:49
Speaker
Yeah, I I don't know if I like what's what feels like is coming Well on a fast train some somewhere where none of us really want to go, but it's still like somehow Driving forward. Yeah, they put it to Speculive and before we let you go here just two days ago. I listened to George Carlin comedy routine and
00:37:15
Speaker
The shit was funny. The shit was funny. It was an hour comedy routine. George Carlin. God bless his soul. Long past. Yeah. Um, Ken, you know, this AI, a lot of this, he called a lot of this before it was Ruby. It was funny. It was him kind of mostly.
00:37:42
Speaker
You know and I think some of some of the stuff on identity and talking about they I just kind of philosophical ideas the things you interact with body and that type of idea and embodiment and Voice or the AI like right now just as far as an example We've recorded this and say we pulled some of your audio from different programs you have some audio there because the program with me on the podcast has a
00:38:10
Speaker
four days of me speaking, three days of me speaking, like the amount of content in like an hour, we could produce a you version of you and a me version of me and release a podcast in six different languages within like the next hour. And then we'll find out what you and I said to each other. And I'm like, Oh,
00:38:33
Speaker
Shit, you know, like back in a while, you come in with the screenplay for that. You might have that picked up at the studio. Right. And that's today. It's yeah. It's it's a wild. It's a wild world. In this wild world, where do people find your art, your stuff?
Where to Find Ruby's Art
00:38:57
Speaker
Where do they where do they go to to find out about your work?
00:39:01
Speaker
My work is at RubyRoth.co, R-U-B-Y-R-O-T-H.CO. And I've kind of made the transition to be focused on my adult art, but my children's work is there under projects. And that was, you know, it's there kind of as a worldwide campaign that I engaged with. And on Instagram, I'm Ruby underscore Roth.
00:39:29
Speaker
And those are the two main platforms where people can find my stuff and whatever I'm working on. My shop is also at rubyroth.co, so there's prints and my new book, Boston Side, where people can watch the trailer and take a peek at some of the inside pages.
00:39:49
Speaker
Great, great trailer. I wanted to thank you deeply, Ruby, as the listeners can't say it, but I can see some of your paintings in the background thinking about La Luz de Jesus. And, you know, you put in a lot of time and I don't know the whole story of the hits you've taken on things, but thank you for doing important, important work and it's work, honestly, that can alter people's lives or wellbeing, how long they live,
00:40:20
Speaker
mental health. Thank you for taking it so seriously. Yeah, really appreciate that. I'm doing it because I can't not do it. Yeah. My my website for a long time was draw or die dot com. It's like I have to do it. It doesn't even matter if I never make a sale again or people don't ever see an artwork like that's that's one thing I think we all need to work on is like as as artists.
00:40:50
Speaker
a lot of us are obsessed with the outcome and productivity. And we really need to remember that as artists, we express ourselves in the way we make our bed every day or how we pour our tea or who we are to each other in the community, how we listen, who we are to our friends and family. And that is as much our art as drawing and painting. And so it kind of helps
00:41:20
Speaker
Helps kind of settle down in this world too that's so focused on capitalism is like, you know, reconnecting and reclaiming yourself and who you are in this world. Yeah. Yeah. There's an authenticity question, you know, and then to stick with that and to know.
00:41:40
Speaker
The element of choice a lot of times when I do this show is always the most fascinating one. People be like, I have no fucking choice, Ken. It's nothing I can do. That's what I do. And other folks being like, you know, I drew 2,000 paintings. I didn't have much an aptitude to begin with, but then I could paint like a mofo. And like because of that, you know, it's different. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's path is really different. It's just different.
00:42:10
Speaker
All right, Ruby, very, very happy to have met you and talked with you. I certainly hope to see your paintings and your art.
00:42:25
Speaker
down at La Luz, which I haven't been there yet. The sea works and great. Again, thank you for your courage and doing what you're doing, seeing what you're doing. It's a tough toil for any artist, particularly if your crowd goes goofy on you and doesn't want you to.
00:42:47
Speaker
to breathe or express, see yourself in a new way. Well, thank you. Thank you for giving artists a platform to talk about things and for appreciating evolution. Alright, thanks Ruby. Have a great, great day. You too. Thank you so much. Bye now.
00:43:17
Speaker
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00:43:48
Speaker
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Speaker
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