New Zealand born artist Ruth Reid, is passionate about painting, exploring, sharing and protecting wilderness areas. She started life as one of a large family on a small farm not far from Geraldine, in rural New Zealand. Her family was fairly self-reliant at a time when it was considered to be necessary and normal.
They owned a bach at a local river with an outdoor hand-operated water pump and no electricity which formed the basis of her enduring love of the simple life, self-sufficiency and for the fabulous New Zealand outdoors. She skis and tramps in remote areas of the mountains and has great pleasure seeing her family continuing to enjoy the great outdoors too.
Although she completed an Arts Certificate at the Aoraki Polytechnic in 1987, married life on a farm with three children and a job in education left little time to pursue this interest. However, through those years she was waiting for the time and place to really ‘have a go’ at exploring the joys of painting as a career and looked forward to using her late father’s historic art equipment. Unsurprisingly, some of her siblings are artists too.
While living in North Yorkshire in the UK in 2006, she joined a group of watercolourists and continued painting on her return to New Zealand. Time was ticking on when the series of major earthquakes in Christchurch beginning in 2010 changed things for Ruth - and for many others. She now had the unexpected ‘opportunity’ of extra time to pursue art as a full-time career.
RuthReidArt.com website was set up and she made a huge self-imposed commitment to attempt ‘100 Paintings in 100 Days’ with the goal of sharpening her skills and style. This resulted in publicity through radio, TV and newspaper article’s which put the pressure on her to complete the project. Fortunately, as she said “I survived.”
