Transforming steel and stone into art
By Pat Nickinson, Special to the Times
Published November 15, 2007
New Tampa Arts Festival
Juried fine art show with entertainment; refreshments available. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Outside under the oaks at Palm Lake Office Complex, 15310 Amberly Drive.
To see Ruby's work, go to www.kurtruby.com.
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ST. PETERSBURG - Sculptor Kurt Ruby squats by the weathered work table just outside his garage, picks up one of the dozens of stones and rocks under the table and licks it.
He wants to see what it will look like - what color and texture - when it has been sealed as part of the copper wall hanging he's working on. Atop the table lie potential combinations of river stones and shale slabs, bits of hardened earth from his travels, and treasures like the lumpy antique brick from the landscape supply.
Inside the garage - a narrow shell attached to his 1950s bungalow - are more scarred work stations where he cuts, burnishes, solders and mills 10- by 3-foot sheets of copper into sculptures with rays that play with the light.
They evoke the shifting pattern of light when creek water tumbles over rocks or the web of tidal lines left in white sand after waves wash ashore.
Originally an architectural sheet-metal worker, Ruby enjoyed years of success as a designer of whimsical marine- and nature-related garden art - including commissions from Clearwater in 1998 for large smiling suns as gifts for its Japanese sister city, Nagano, and for the commissioner of the Winter Olympics.
But Ruby is a restless spirit; he shifted his style and focus to fine art, a move that has proved popular. In the past 18 months, he has sold out in nine shows.
"My art sells because of the simplicity," Ruby says. "Art is the line, the curve. Like a female body. Clean and simple curves."
He calls his current line of wall sculptures the "evolution" series: bold, with dark patinas and wavy-ridged copper rays emanating from a center of stones. The rock-copper combination started when Ruby played with small stones from an Illinois lake as bases for copper vases.
The smallest wall sculptures in this series vary in diameter from 20 to 36 inches, some round, some elliptical; the largest are rectangular, 6 feet long.
Although he exhibits in shows as distant as Wyoming and Colorado and spent most of last summer in shows around the Great Lakes, more than half of the two-dozen-plus shows he does each year are in Florida: Naples' Downtown Festival of the Arts, Bonita Springs' National Art Festival, Fort Lauderdale's Las Olas, Jupiter's ArtiGras Fine Arts Festival, West Palm Beach's SunFest and St. Petersburg's Mainsail. He will be at the New Tampa Arts Festival this weekend.
Ruby and his golden retriever, Daisy, escape Florida's summers to camp in his travel trailer. Ruby takes time off between shows to ride his Harley or build new sculptures for the next week's festival. He has designed it so that all of his work tools and materials are portable.
"I've made it simple," he says. "You can make work difficult if you want to . . . but I love the simplicity of it all. I get pretty much instant gratification with this art."
Pat Nickinson is an instructor at the University of South Florida.