Ruth Hamill Ruth Hamill is a visual artist working across painting, printmaking and collage to explore transience in contemporary life through pervasive symbols such as ocean waves and cut flowers.
Walden Pond Fall I, 24x36, encaustic on board

Walden Pond Fall I, 24x36, encaustic on board

Walden Pond II, 18x24, encaustic on board

Walden Pond II, 18x24, encaustic on board

Walden Ripples I (diptych), 24x24, oil on board

Walden Ripples I (diptych), 24x24, oil on board

Walden Ripples II (diptych), 24x24, oil on board

Walden Ripples II (diptych), 24x24, oil on board

Ripples on Walden Pond, 24x24, oil on board

Ripples on Walden Pond, 24x24, oil on board

These paintings are an ode to Henry David Thoreau and his Walden Pond.

Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams"

The first year I moved to Massachusetts, I visited Walden Pond.  My kids were little, in first grade and pre-K, and they both had an afternoon off so we packed snacks, buckled in, and drove the 45 minutes in heavy traffic to a more city-like area than where we lived.  

Walden had seemed like a mythical or metaphorical place to me, not real, and I was disappointed, at first.  Before you see the water, you go past chainlink fence.  But the pond was so stunning and the fall day so perfect that all three of us, years later, vividly recall it.  I made these paintings 2006 - 2009.