About

Ruth Geos lives and works in San Francisco. Her upstairs corner studio, at Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco, has been her working base since 1986. Her distinctive and original work—joining the elements of bird feathers, gold, poetry, and music— reaches always for the ecstatic. The words and poetry of Emily Dickinson are an ongoing and powerful source, along with the work of a few other poets, including John Keats.

Ruth Geos [She/Her/Hers] may be contacted at ruthgeos@gmail.com or through the Contact page.

STATEMENT

I am deeply drawn to the bird world as a boundless source of color, song, symbol, depth, and beauty: all the dazzle of life that takes us by sheer surprise. My work draws on these traces of bird life--bird feathers--joined with the separate fineness of gold--and threaded through with poetry and the embrace of music.  

Time ticks differently in a studio: it takes time to make my work; and one process moves into the next. For me, each part of the process is integral to the whole in the making of my work, for whatever time it needs and whatever direction it requires. 

I am often asked about the feather elements I use, and that, too, is a process to itself.  The feathers come to me from what has become a community of friends to my studio, an accumulation of the seasonal molt of the birds they keep, over different seasons and over many years--feather by feather. This studio accumulation over the years from different birds, the amazing range of color, pattern, size, and form is its own ongoing process and a deep pleasure. Most of the birds the feathers represent are exotic parrots and parakeets, peacocks and pheasants;  some are local, from the San Francisco Bay Area, and some from further away: Canada, Paris, Florida, Texas, and other places in the world. None are identical.

The gilding part begins after the work has found its own form. Water-gilding is a wondrous, arcane, and multi-layered way to gild--seen in the mirror-bright halos of angels in 13th century Italian panel painting: there the gold encircling the saints is an illumination of the divine. In the preparation, once the underlayers of rabbit skin glue, chalk, and a red clay bole are ready, the gold leaf is adhered with water. When dry, the surface is polished with tools of agate, revealing the flow of gold and light, illuminating the whole and mirroring whatever comes near. It becomes a pool of light.

To quote the words of Emily Dickinson:  “Beauty is nature’s fact”