Every family
should have an Aunt Ruthie--unique, creative, eccentric, and a bit out of the
box. She was one of the two High Rock aunts that helped make visits there
“events.” (The other was Aunt Lorene—and that’s another story.)
She--was a
companion on our “safaris” into the woods on Sunday
afternoons—made the best “Sissy rolls”—filled the
special bowl with stuffed dates at Christmas—rambled through thrift
stores with us-- and gave us pastel chalks hoping to bring out our
inner artists.
She was a collector, and her gifts of art, furniture, jewelry and
other treasures grace all of our family homes today.
Ruth Elizabeth
Cole was born in 1919 and spent most of her young life at the High Rock house
with her parents, Granny and Granddaddy Cole.
She was educated at "WC" (Women’s
College--now UNC-G) and taught elementary school in
NC for about 40 years.
She may have been and educator by vocation, but she was an artist at heart.
According
to Aunt Ruthie, one of her earliest memories was of looking at a bush of
beautiful red roses in Granny’s yard. She remembers pulling off some of the
petals, immersing them in water, and trying to “paint” the outside of the white
clapboard house with them so that the home would be the same vibrant red as the
roses.
While that early artistic endeavor wasn’t successful, her lifelong pursuit of
creating beauty through her paintings has been. The virtually unspoiled rural
landscapes around the High Rock farm, including the Yadkin River, the foothills
of the Flat Swamp Mountains, and the flowers in Granny’s gardens (which she and
Aunt Ruthie cut to decorate the house) served to inspire many of her
paintings.
Her versatility
as an artist is surprising as I look now through the vast number of works she
produced. Using a variety of media--oil, acrylics and watercolor--and she
painted in a range of styles, from naïve to abstract. She was probably most
fond of and comfortable with a soothing
impressionism, which allowed the viewer to use her art as a doorway for his or
her own mental or creative wanderings.
In her own words,
in an Artist’s Statement produced some years ago, she wrote:
I
have always been interested in the Visual Arts. This interest was nurtured for many years by working with children and
fostering their creative activities.
I
determined that when I stopped teaching, I would pursue this wonderful area of human enrichment. The time from 1975
through 1985 was filled with a series of
classes, workshops, teachers and art groups. Now I work alone, submitting my work to juried shows and galleries in
Charlotte, NC [and beyond]. To
me, the greatest teacher of art is nature, and the greatest quality of art is honesty. To be true to nature (not to be
confused with copying nature) and to your
own originality is no mean task. The
journey has been rewarding but never ending. The vista is always broadening.
Ruth Cole, artist, was
featured in a solo exhibition in 1996 at the Arts Center Gallery in Lexington,
and received numerous awards in juried shows for her still life and landscape
paintings. Her art serves as a preservation of the beauty of rural Piedmont North Carolina and a reminder of the loveliness that surrounds us if
we take the time to notice.
And never for a moment think that
she is not still..."Aunt Ruthie."
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Her experiments
inspired me to dry some poke berries (pokeweed) one summer and save it for
dying eggs the next spring. Surely the eggs would be the beautiful purple of
the berries. 
