AGE IS NO BARRIER TO ART
Artist uncovers her talent later in life
Artist Ruth Browning discovered her greatest talent later in life. Some 13 years ago, she joined a painter friend for a vacation in Grenada, and the friend encouraged her to bring some acrylic paint, brushes and canvas with her.
“She said it would be a good opportunity for me to try something different,” recalls Browning.
To that point, she says, she had never painted or drawn, but she accepted the challenge. “We sat down on the sands of Grenada and I dabbled away painting on my canvas. I really enjoyed what I was doing.”
Her friend’s approval of the finished product was the catalyst she needed to continue. “I felt so good when I was painting and somehow I just got hooked.”
From this point on, whenever she and her husband Gerry went travelling — and their many trips took them across Canada, to the U.S. and Europe — she sketched and painted the landscapes and seascapes that caught her attention.
“I started filling our house with paintings,” she says. “Before I started painting, I had done a lot of photography and had taken photographs on our journeys. Now, my life changed to painting what I saw. And because I didn’t always have time to paint right away, I started working from photographs.
“The lovely part of that,” she continues, ‘is that I could capture what I had seen and the light stayed the same and light is a big part of painting. The other funny thing is that with photography, I had to wait for people to get out of the way before taking a photograph. With painting, I didn’t have to wait. I just removed them when I painted.”
The next stage in Browning’s life as a painter came when a couple visiting her winter home in Florida asked if she would consider selling one of the paintings — a winter farm scene hanging in the guest bedroom — for the price they suggested.
“Until then, I really hadn’t thought about selling my paintings,” says Browning, now 78. “But, from then on, it has just seemed to happen. The friends that bought the first painting have it set up with a light on it and they tell me that people often ask about the artist. I feel very flattered.”
Recently, the purchasers of that first painting commissioned her to do a second landscape — this time from a photograph they had taken of a thatched cottage in England — at twice the price they paid for the earlier Browning original. And, last month, a selection of her works were displayed in her first solo show.
To date, she has sold many of her paintings and still has her walls covered with her favourite creations. The mother of four and grandmother of 10 still seems surprised that her paintings are of interest internationally.
“I’ve often felt sad that it took me so long to discover art,” says Browning, “but I was blessed to grow up surrounded by talented people. My mother was an artist. My uncle and my brother were professional photographers. One of my daughters, Tanis Browning Shelp, is a published author and I have always been surrounded by people who are musical. I did sing in a choir and enjoyed photography, but I didn’t know I had an ounce of talent as a painter.”