Ruth Waddell: Muse to an artist, gift to everyone else
In order to write about Ruth Waddell, who died on Aug. 23 at 97, I first must mention her husband, the late sculptor John Waddell.
I must do so because that is what Ruth did for more than 70 years.
As one writer put it, “under the influence of Ruth’s humanistic vision and her immediate, whole-hearted devotion to shielding him from the disruptions of everyday life, John was galvanized ...”
It is a slightly strange thing, but magical, to have lived a life of such loving adventure and quiet grandeur that being the lifelong muse of a famous artist is, in most ways, the least of your accomplishments.
That is the life of Ruth Waddell. In 2019, when John died, I wrote about him, and how I’d met him first while covering the arts for The Arizona Republic in the early 1980s.
His bronze sculptures downtown outside the Herberger Theater Center, a series of life-size nudes, are perhaps the most iconic works of art in the city. But only a tiny sampling of his work.
He was among a generation of artists who recognized that by living in Arizona they would be surrounded by wonder. The art they made eventually came to be of this place, at first reflecting it. Then defining it.
In the early ’80s Waddell told me, “Basically, the contrast between my old work and my new work is this: In those days I was telling people how bad they are. Now I am telling them how good they are. What I believe now is that if I tell people how beautiful they are, they are more likely to save themselves.”
An argument could be made that John and Ruth saved each other.
In 1986, I visited the Waddells with the writer Anne Stephenson, who was doing a profile of John for The Republic.
It was 21⁄2 years after a fire had leveled their studio and home north of Cottonwood, destroying everything — paintings, molds, sketchbooks, as well as roughly 45 years of accumulated records of sculpture work.
The couple rebuilt.
Waddell told Anne, “I started afresh. I was able to do that partly because of Ruth. She was always by my side, so I didn’t face things alone.”
She was there by his side during that interview. Charming. Funny. Welcoming. Mischievous.
The couple met as students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. John invited her to pose for a painting. Ruth said later, “By the time he finished working on that painting we never parted.”
They were married for 70 years. For much of that time Ruth ran the Waddell Master Apprentice Program, through which generations of artists got to work with them.
She, too, was a painter and sculptor. As well as a wife. A mother. A mentor. A friend. A muse.
The dancer and model Delisa Miles
said of Ruth’s work, “Her pastel drawings see into places where light breaks apart and dances, a portrait becomes not only of the shape and lines of that particular person or tree, but what is under the surface, or what emanates from that being.”
Ruth’s work is in collections all over the world.
Her masterpiece, however, is her life, her family. Her husband, two sons and daughter. That is made clear in an obituary written about her mom by daughter Amy.
She said of Ruth, “I am made of a myriad of reflections of her. I have walked a path lit by her rich mind, profound observations, eye for beauty and her profound interest and generosity of spirit ...”