Riverdale resident’s love for art comes later in life

When Ruth Hurd started creating art, a friend and former co-worker gave her advice on how to stay consistent with her work: “What gets measured gets done.”

That friend was a former co-worker who happens to be Robert Pillsbury, president of the Salmagundi Club, a historic art center that has been part of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village since 1871. 

“He really got me over the hurdle of making the transition into being an artist full-time and then how do I measure what I’m doing,” Hurd said.

Since then, Hurd has taken that advice to heart, painting as often as she can with a numeric goal in mind. 

Art piqued the Riverdale resident’s interest more than 20 years ago, and after retiring, she’s taken courses at New York University and The Art Students League of New York, where she’s in her final year as a board member. 

When she started out, Hurd made representational art. But as she’s gotten older, Hurd has trouble keeping her hand steady enough to make straight lines. This new challenge, coupled with a course she took at the Art Students League with a new instructor, led her to pursue abstract painting. 

Her work is currently on display at Riverdale Senior Services’ Vintage Artists Gallery with the piece “Running in the Rapids,” an abstract creation using only a rubber wedge on paper. In Manhattan, she exhibited work at The Interchurch Center called “Imaginings” that ran until last Wednesday. The pieces were inspired by a video of atomic bomb tests done in the Marshall Islands that she said was horrifying to watch. The piece is a loose representation of the clouds and the ocean that surrounded the explosion’s black smoke.

“I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it,” she said, “and I had all these images, and I just tried to put that feeling on paper.”

Hurd’s inspiration for her work comes from tragedy and being entranced by beautiful things. She said she doesn’t try to maintain any balance between the vastly different concepts. 

“I’m a yo-yo,” she said. 

If there’s anything Hurd has taken away from more than two decades of painting, it’s that she encourages people to critique her work because she’s not sensitive about it.

“Someone saying to me, ‘Gee that’s very nice, I love it,’ that’s great as a first comment, but I hope you’re going to come back with something a little more useful to me,” she said. “The goal is to have the painting be overall effective.”

She’s also learned that putting her work on display isn’t daunting, it’s enlightening. 

“I think for an artist, having to put your work up on a wall out there next to other people’s work is incentive to keep improving,” she said. “If you’re not otherwise motivated, it really does motivate you. You don’t want to look bad.”

Hurd’s decades-long love for art may have come later in her life, but the challenges and day-to-day hustle are here to stay.

“It’s both a lot of fun and fraught with peril,” she said. “There’s highs and lows. When I’m having a bad day, when nothing seems to be working and nothing feels right, sometimes you just have to slop down something and see what happens and every now and then it works. 

“But the key is to just keep painting.”