Ruth Todd Paintings

Ruth Todd (1909-2006, American Woman Artist) one of Colorado’s most prominent avant-garde artists and played a significant role in Colorado’s art history. Known for painting and collage. Still life with lemon and banana on kitchen table. Ruth Thomas Todd was born in 1909 in Sanford, North Carolina. She arrived in New York City in the 1930s where she began her career as a fashion model supporting herself as she attended classes at the Art Students League. For reasons of health she moved to Colorado Springs to treat her condition. During her recuperation she started to draw and studied under famous American abstract painter Robert Motherwell, who was teaching at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at the time. By the 1950s, her career as an abstract expressionist painter was blooming. She was one of Colorado’s most visible and avant-garde artists. Ruth married Littleton Todd, a poet and a woodworker. In 1953, Todd traveled to Europe (Paris, France) to study art and to paint. Littleton Todd opened a design studio in Denver where he manufactured and sold modern furniture. She would incorporate sawdust and other found materials from the workshop imbued with oil paint into her abstract work to create unique topographies and patterns. She showed at numerous Gilpin County Art Exhibitions, the Denver Art Museum, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Women’s College, the University of Colorado, Boulder, the Colorado State Fair, and the Jewish Community Center. Among the Colorado Modernists that she exhibited with were Vance Kirkland, Frank Vavra, Martha Epp, Ardis Sturdy...