RUBYLEE

Ruby Lee had a calling. She knew what she wanted and needed to do with her life from a very early age and would steadfastly follow her bliss of becoming a great artist. Her multi-racial background served to forge a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures in a visual style that is a synthesis of Western Classical form and the aesthetic sensibilities of the Far East. A figural artist, she focuses on the beauty and grace of the archetypal Feminine in all her aspects.

The International Settlement in Shanghai was neutral ground during World War ll and it was there that Rubylee’s mother, who was of Japanese and English descent and from whom she inherited her talent in the visual arts, met and married her father, F.X. Long.  A journalist by profession, he had grown up in cosmopolitan circumstances as the son of Austrian Leopoldini Rössler and Chinese magician Long Tack Sam who was one of the brightest stars of Vaudeville in the early 1900s, topping the bill at New York’s Palace Theater and touring the world with his exotic troupe of acrobatic performers.

Born in Hong Kong in 1948, the first of four children, Rubylee began drawing as soon as she could hold a pencil. She traveled with her family to Japan, eventually setting sail for Western Europe through the Suez Canal to Marseille and onto Vienna.  In 1956, her father landed a position with Reuters News Agency in London where her formal education began in earnest. She won an academic scholarship to a French convent school and took extra curricula life drawing classes.  After completing an advance level course in Art History, she was awarded a Foundation Scholarship in 1967 to St. Martin’s School of Art in the center of London, where she would spend all her spare time with the old masters of the High Italian Renaissance at the National Gallery.  Her drawing skills were already above average and a yearning for spiritual growth began to surface. 

It was the Sixties and she was enjoying the company of bohemian beat poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, photographers, and art house filmmakers. 

Looking through the books of a second hand bookstore in Soho, she noticed a bright yellow little book entitled “Karma and the Law of Cause and Effect”.  In the popular art world, Andy Warhol was making statements with multiple images of Campbell Soup cans, John Cage was being heralded in the music of the avant-garde, Yoko Ono was climbing naked in and out of plastic bags at the Arts Lab, and RubyLee decided to leave the British Isles in search of the wisdom of the East that she had glimpsed in that tiny yellow book.  The principal at St. Martin’s wished her well on her quest for illumination and reminded her to return the volume on Leonardo Da Vinci to the school library. 

In a Chelsea restaurant called Muffins, Anthony Summers, now author then producer of BBC’s 24 Hours, bought one of her first oil paintings titled “Angie”. With this £40 sale, which was then the equivalent of $100 US dollars, she left her few worldly possessions including paints and portfolio with a reliable high school friend, donned a colorful Tibetan blanket, packed an extra pair of blue jeans and her passport into a hand-woven bag and embarked for the great unknown with a huge sense of adventure and armed with only a sketchbook and pencils.  In Greece, she boarded a steamer headed for the Middle East with thoughts of going overland by train to Katmandu drawing quick portraits of faces that she saw in cafés along the way to pay for room and board.  However, in Jerusalem, influenced by the music of the times and experimenting with mind expanding substances, she was introduced to the posters of San Francisco’s psychedelic artists and to Stanley Kubrick’s iconic imagery of death and rebirth in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”.  This convergence of events led to a spiritual awakening and her course was redirected to the USA. 

Arriving in New York City for the very first time in October of ‘69, she made her way across country to the coast of Northern California where she became enamored of the gentle flower children and the movement to return to Native Americans’ tribal ways. She immediately connected with the indigenous people’s reverence for the sacredness of the natural world, their understanding of the web of life and the responsibility to future generations as wise stewards of the Earth.

1972 in San Francisco’s North Beach, an energetic man, whom Rubylee describes as “a mercurial wizard”, took her by the hand. His opening line was “Let’s do a painting together.”  He painted large sumi-like landscapes on a white canvas using bold, broad brushstrokes.  Neither of them signed any of their work until the vice president of Walt Disney Productions wanted to buy one of their joint paintings in Ojai and insisted upon a signature.  Whereupon, she signed both Popo and RubyLee and a myth was born.  In fact, they actually painted on only two or three canvases together.  Rather Popo began to groom her talent, direct the imagery, and assume the role of business manager.  They collaborated on countless paintings for the next ten years.  She describes this early work under the influence of Popo’s technique of thin oil washes in fast, loose spontaneous strokes, as sketches in oil paint. 

At a street fair in Los Angeles, an art publishing house in Beverley Hills with worldwide distribution, discovered her work in 1974 and published her painting entitled "Proud American" in an unlimited edition offset lithograph. Avidly painting three or four canvases a day like a musician practicing scales, she would over time, refine her brushstrokes and subtly augment the colors of her palette while working with live models, teaching them Yoga and Tai Chi.

Her love for Zen, a white Arabian horse, produced some magnificent paintings of horses. Although the physical models were the Andalusian stallions of Hollywood’s Budd Boetticher, it was her beloved horse, Zen, who inspired her as she took the reins of her own life while her relationship with Popo dissolved. From 1985 onwards, she would sign all her work solely as RubyLee.

The Artist’s Response: Radio Interview with Rubylee 2022

Wavy Gravy, the Voice at Woodstock and clown prince of the counterculture, found her exhibiting her work at an Earth Day Festival in 1986.  Out of this meeting emerged a huge portrait of his face, which was subsequently used as the centerpiece of a psychedelic Rock n’ Roll poster designed by Alton Kelley, one of the 5 major Fillmore Poster Artists of the Sixties. The poster was highly praised by Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters and chronicled by Paul Grushkin in “The Art of Rock”.  David Crosby, of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, upon purchasing the original portrait at a show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, declared: “the painting looks more like Wavy than Wavy!”

In the early 1990s, Dmitri Stroganov a fine Russian artist was brought to her door. He had been trained in St. Petersburg and knew how to create sound with color composition. For the next four years, they collaborated on a series of twenty paintings based on the glyphs of the ancient Mayan calendar. By the turn of the twenty first century, her work had evolved from the personal to the transpersonal. Her painting returned to an elegant simplicity - the gestures ever graceful; the flesh tones luminescent; the emotional content transcendent.

2020 marked a radical change in medium. Her former figural paintings devoid of any background could be attributed to her movement across the globe. Although Ruby herself might describe the white space surrounding the figures in her paintings as the field of pure potentiality, the absence of backgrounds can also be viewed in the context of the cultural milieu of London in the 1960s. From the perspective of her artistic development, RubyLee’s earlier work was perhaps a foreshadowing of her current work as a sculptress, where the formless negative space is as important as the positive form in creating a whole work of art.

A life’s purpose

“Authenticity involves making your heart and soul visible. My sculptural works embody ideas of serenity and peace, meditative qualities that have calming effects. The process begins with centering my inner self and clearing my mind. I feel as though I am transported into a realm of idealism where simplicity of line and form combine with depth of emotional content. In this altered state, I become my art, imagining myself as whatever part of the anatomy I am working on. This allows me to embed the life force into the work which ultimately emanates from the material object as spirit.” ~ RubyLee