Nature Rendered in Block Prints- Ruth Trevarrow
About Ruth Trevarrow
Ruth Trevarrow’s artwork focuses on nature. She has done an extensive series of animal bones using scratch-board renderings, prints, and hardboard silhouettes. Ruth especially loves cutting blocks to use for printing. The blocks Ruth cuts can be made of wood, linoleum, cardboard or foam.
Printmaking, Black Ink, and Potomac River Conservation
Ruth Trevarrow talks about her journey as an artist and how printmaking helped her rethink the value of her work. Like many artists, Ruth struggled with determining what a single piece of art was worth. Printmaking eased that pressure because it allowed her to create multiple prints from one original image, making her work more accessible while still preserving the care and craft behind each piece.
Ruth works primarily with black ink, which she describes as a natural outcome of her creative process. Her images often begin with mark-making through drawing, pen, or ink. For Ruth, black ink becomes the visual vocabulary through which her images take shape.
The complexity of each image helps determine the medium Ruth chooses to carve. Her latest project is a four-image series for the Potomac Conservancy, an organization focused on protecting the Potomac River and its surrounding watershed.
On the Women Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast, Ruth discusses the shad print she created for the project. Shad are migratory fish that travel from the ocean into the Potomac River each year to spawn. Through this work, Ruth connects printmaking, river conservation, and the life cycles of species that depend on healthy waterways.
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Pam Ferris-Olson (00:00): Hi, Ruth, how are you?
Ruth Trevarrow (00:02): Good. How are you? Sorry.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:03): Is it as hot there as it is here?
Ruth Trevarrow (00:07): Yeah, it's in the 90s. It's very unpleasant.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:11): Okay. Yeah. Well, you're in D.C. and it can be hot in the summer and humid. I'm in the Portland Maine area and it shouldn't be this hot. It's 86.
Ruth Trevarrow (00:19): No, it really shouldn't. I'm going to Portland, Oregon on Sunday.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:25): It's 104, 105.
Ruth Trevarrow (00:27): I know.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:28): I think you can have your cooked salmon and you won't have to do more than just go down to the wharf.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:35): Today on the Women Mind the Water podcast, I am speaking with Ruth Trevarrow. Much of her work focuses on nature. She's done an extensive series on animal bones using scratchboard renderings, prints, and hardboard silhouettes. Today, we will be discussing her block prints. The Women Mind the Water podcast engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the ocean. Through these stories, Women Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
Pam Ferris-Olson (01:10): Our guest today is Ruth Trevarrow. Ruth has worked in many mediums, but she particularly loves cutting blocks to use for printing. The blocks Ruth cuts can be made of wood, linoleum, cardboard, or foam. Ruth grew up in the Washington D.C. area and says she benefited from being close to the national museum system. Proximity to the Smithsonian collections provided her with many opportunities to study natural history specimens.
Pam Ferris-Olson (01:40): Welcome, Ruth. I'm looking forward to learning about your printing process and your evolution as an artist, particularly your water-inspired images. Let's begin with a discussion of the art of block printing. What about this art form interests you?
Ruth Trevarrow (01:56): Good question. I think I like the artwork that I make, and when you paint something, there's one, and when you make a print, you can make more than one, and so it's easier to give it away. I've been an artist for a long time and I used to really struggle with how much [inaudible 00:02:23] and then my spouse one time suggested something that really appealed to me. She said, "Why don't you see how little you can sell your work for? Like, how little you're comfortable with letting it go for?" And I was like, "That's a really good idea."
Ruth Trevarrow (02:38): I have a job. It's not the money so much, but I will say, whenever I sell anything, it does give me a good, lucky feeling.
Pam Ferris-Olson (02:46): I was going to say, that's a really nice sentiment. I like that, to make art affordable and not feel like it's just so important that you better pay through the nose, or you're not going to get a copy of what I make. Right.
Ruth Trevarrow (02:59): Thank you. I think that's one of the things that really appeals to me about printmaking, also block printing, wood cuts, is there's something about the ... I don't know, there's something recognizable in it. It's almost like a way that I see already. You know what I mean?
Pam Ferris-Olson (03:14): Mm-hmm (affirmative). So do you work solely with black ink?
Ruth Trevarrow (03:21): No, but I do a lot, and I think, probably again, one of the reasons I do that is because that is ... I wouldn't say that's how I see, but that's how I record, right? So, all artwork that I do, even if I were doing photography or sculpture or an audio installation, I just did one of those, begins with making marks on paper, you know?
Ruth Trevarrow (03:47): Mark-making is some point in our development as a species, as I understand it, like in caves and such, that making marks about ourselves and our experience. So, all of my work starts with drawing, and usually that's in gray or black. And I think that it becomes a kind of ... Rendering things with line and shade and texture in black on white or vice versa, it's sort of become like a visual vernacular for me, like a vocabulary or a way of communicating.
Pam Ferris-Olson (04:28): How do you select the medium on which to carve the image?
Ruth Trevarrow (04:32): That's a good question. Sometimes I think about the complexity of the image. If it's a very complicated or detailed image, then I would choose something that is more durable and can take the cutting, because the instruments are very sharp. You have to sharpen them often. And so, I might choose wood or I might choose linoleum.
Ruth Trevarrow (04:59): I use a lot of linoleum because it is sort of a neutral surface. It doesn't have a texture. It doesn't bring something to the print other than its stability. And artists have used linoleum a lot for a long time and I've trusted their judgment. I mean, I've experimented with other materials. I do love carving in wood. It takes longer and it is more difficult. It's not as, I don't know, I wouldn't say forgiving exactly, but ... And sometimes I carve just on whatever is at hand.
Ruth Trevarrow (05:31): One day, I was standing out on the dock that I built into a lake. We have a family house on in Michigan, we have a peninsula of Michigan, and I was just mesmerized by the surface of the water, the light on the water. And I reached in my pocket and I had my pocket knife and I had a little scrap of linoleum from my studio. So, I just opened my pocket knife, and I held that scrap of linoleum in my hand, and I just scratched away on there, looking at the water, and that's one of my favorite prints in the last 10 years, probably. It's like a sketch of the surface of the water on a scrap.
Ruth Trevarrow (06:12): And then in this current project that I'm working on, I'm experimenting with using an inexpensive, very homogenous-textured foam to create color areas, blocks of color, behind the black line print, which will be the last block to print so that they will have some color.
Pam Ferris-Olson (06:36): Oh, yeah. So what is your process for creating the image on the block?
Ruth Trevarrow (06:42): That's a good question too. I think I could be described as perhaps a little obsessive. A lot of scientists and artists are, you know, and I see something that I like and I just become transfixed, whether it's the surface of the water or the shadow of the trees or some insect, a fish in the water. That's something that's very fascinating to me are fish, seeing fish under the water, going about their business, eating or mating or chasing each other or hunting and hiding. And I'll just study something for a long time.
Ruth Trevarrow (07:26): Often the best place to sight it is out in nature, but oftentimes I'll look at pictures or I'll take pictures of things and bring them back. And sometimes I'll even, and I recommend this to younger artists, that I'll draw right on top of a photograph I've taken. I'll print it out on a printer at Kinko's or FedEx or something, and I'll just take my black pen and just draw right on top of it and see what I learned from copying it.
Ruth Trevarrow (07:53): A lot of times I think, "I'm not so creative as I am copying nature," you know? I'm looking at something and I'm studying it over and over and over again, and I'm deciding what lines I like the best. What are the most beautiful? And then I become sort of fluent, for me, in what I see in that thing, and then eventually I'll get around to making what I want the drawing to look like.
Ruth Trevarrow (08:17): For this project, I've described a little bit from the Potomac Conservancy. I just drew and drew and drew and drew the osprey, and eventually I came up with a composition that I wanted to use. It's almost like an illustration showing its environment and the Potomac River. And then I need to reverse the image and put it on the block and that can be achieved in a number of ways. But one of my favorites is covering the back of the paper with pencil and then ... Well, no, covering the front. Oh my gosh, it's so complicated. You have to reverse the image.
Pam Ferris-Olson (08:57): Yes.
Ruth Trevarrow (08:58): And so what I'll do is I'll draw on top of whatever the final composition is that I've made, turn the paper over and tape it down, face down on the block that I'm going to carve, and then rub that. And then that reversed image is transferred onto the block, and that's when I begin.
Pam Ferris-Olson (09:17): Oh. How do you go about selecting a subject, and particularly what inspires you to select water-related subjects?
Ruth Trevarrow (09:24): Some of my best memories are by water, and I find I am calmed and mesmerized by water, the surface of water I described looking at fish. I like being on the surface of water.
Ruth Trevarrow (09:40): I remember as a kid, I would go out late at night. It didn't have to be that late because it was so far north. Very little light pollution in the skies there, and oh, go out on the rowboat, and I would lay down and I would look up at the sky. And then I remember one time sitting up and noticing that everything in the sky was reflected on the surface of the water, everything. And I felt it was a little trippy. I felt like I was floating on the sky, you know? And I could even see it was the Perseid meteor shower, and I could see shooting stars on the surface of the water. So, it's like magic to me, and most of our planet is covered in water, and ... I don't know.
Pam Ferris-Olson (10:34): I fully understand what you say. I mean, I particularly like the July 4th near some place where the fireworks are over water.
Ruth Trevarrow (10:42): Ah.
Pam Ferris-Olson (10:42): Because then you get the double. You get to look in the sky and you look too in the water.
Ruth Trevarrow (10:46): Right. Yeah.
Pam Ferris-Olson (10:49): Can you tell me a story about one of your water-related prints, how the idea for the image moved from the concept to the final print? And for those who are listening to an audio-only version of the podcast, can you describe the artwork?
Ruth Trevarrow (11:04): Yes. I will describe one of the four prints that I'm creating for the Potomac Conservancy. They asked me to make four prints for one of their annual fundraising projects, so I'm working on the osprey, the dolphin, beaver, and shad.
Ruth Trevarrow (11:26): The shad, that is an ocean-going fish. Well, when it spawns, like herring or salmon, it runs as far up ... freshwater streams, it runs up the Chesapeake Bay and then Potomac River, and then Rock Creek, even, in Washington, D.C. And I'm driving along and I'm thinking about going fishing with my friend and I glance over at the creek, and in the creek, I can see all these fish racing against the current, racing upstream, and they were such generic-looking fish. They were just like a fish, like a silver leaf. They were shaped like a leaf with a tail. They were just silver, and it would catch the light, and they were crowded together, racing north. And that is the inspiration for the print that I made of the small school of startled shad.
Ruth Trevarrow (12:28): So, these shad that I did in the print are not jammed together in Rock Creek because it's about the Potomac River, and so I did them as I used to see them. I went out fishing from the shore even of the Potomac. And what's happening is they're startled by something from above. It's like we're looking down on them or sort of from the shore at them. And I did walk out and see shad while I was preparing to do this print, in the river and in the creek. I could see them. The water was clear enough. They're in a school. They hang out together and every now and then somebody gets startled and they all turn this way. And so this print in particular is showing that they're startled by something. Maybe it's an osprey hunting them. Maybe an osprey coming down to get one of them, and they all are quickly changing direction.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:19): Yeah. I kayak on Casco Bay.
Ruth Trevarrow (13:22): Oh, wow.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:22): And it's really fun to get yourself into the middle of a fish ball.
Ruth Trevarrow (13:27): Oh, yeah.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:27): And the water is just ... it makes noise as if it's boiling.
Ruth Trevarrow (13:32): It's churning? Wow.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:33): Yeah. Can't see the fish, but I can hear them.
Ruth Trevarrow (13:36): Wow.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:37): So, Ruth, what advice can you give listeners who want to express their concern for the water and encourage others to take action to protect the water and its creatures?
Ruth Trevarrow (13:48): I would say support two conservation organizations, one that's local to your home, for example, I'm working with the Potomac Conservancy, and one that is international or national. I particularly like the Union of Concerned Scientists. They're the ones who publish the Red List, which is the list of threatened, endangered, and extinct species. I think that's a very important list that ... It took me a while, while reviewing it, to understand it, but now I take it very seriously.
Ruth Trevarrow (14:20): I think appreciating the beauty of what we have helps us take better care of it. It's kind of my notion. I don't know for sure how much that works, but I know that I am more careful with how I use water and what products I choose to buy and how they interact with the environment.
Pam Ferris-Olson (14:42): And I think the love and care that you put into your art probably transmits that, translates that, for people who see your art.
Ruth Trevarrow (14:51): Oh, thank you.
Pam Ferris-Olson (14:52): I'd like to remind our listeners that I've been speaking with Ruth Trevarrow for the Woman Mind the Water podcast series. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com. An audio version of these podcasts is available on the Woman Mind the Water website and on iTunes and Spotify. Women Mind the Water is grateful to Ja1ne Rice for the song, Women of Water (singing). All rights for the Women Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson. Thank you for listening.
