Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s
Vol. 1, Issue 4,
Nov. 13, 2025
page 2
Dust From Our Fathers: The art of Ricardo Ruiz
D. M. Allison, Nov. 13, 2025
I’ve been working on a story about the artist Ricardo Ruiz, whose recent exhibition, "Tales From Beyond the Porchlight" at Redbud Arts Center, lingered with me long after the closing reception. Listening to Ricardo speak with artist and gallerist Andrew Durham, I understood immediately where his imagery comes from. Ricardo was born into a family of storytellers, the kind of home where the afternoon light slants across a backyard grill while uncles sip their beers and spin tales late into the evening.
His father and uncles had a talent for “big stories,” the kind that stretch reality until it becomes a kind of truth all its own. But it was his Tia Enriqueta who shaped his imagination most profoundly. She was the reason he spent the first seven years of his life in what can only be described as joyful terror. Her specialty was horrifying, beautifully detailed cautionary tales about the monsters that roamed the shadows beyond the glow of the porchlight. She whispered about El Cucuy, the boogeyman who dragged disobedient children to his cave, about La Llorona who mistook wandering kids for the babies she drowned, about the rude boy swallowed by the moon, and the disobedient girl whose face turned into a cow. These stories kept young Ricardo inside before sundown and fueled the nightmares that gave shape to the mythologies he now paints.
As he grew older, drawing became a natural extension of the narrative world he inhabited. Over time he filled sketchbooks with the toys and objects he collected, letting them perform as actors in what he calls his “little sketched-out plays.” His show Tales From Beyond the Porchlight at Redbud Arts Center was his way of introducing viewers to the creatures of his own personal folklore. Alongside Goldilocks and Aesop’s animals, you meet El Nopalito, El Torito de la Copita, and El Mocho Eugenio, figures equally at home in the shadows of childhood memory and the broader world of fable.
Ricardo told me, “I was always drawing something. I mean, I wasn’t even potty trained yet and my uncle thought I was bewitched.” When he works, he occupies a place beyond conscious thought. He draws fast, guided by intuition. His Stonehenge paper doesn’t smudge, letting ink sink into it “like a tattoo,” which suits the urgency of his hand. “I’m like a dog when his master comes home,” he said. “That excitement you feel before you get to play that’s how I feel heading to the studio.”
Ricardo says he’s never worried about running out of ideas. “I’m not like Billy Joel who said he had nothing left to say. Every day something sparks, maybe a phrase, a dream, a person passing by.” One of his aunts once told him, “We are all little more than the gatherers of our fathers’ dust,” and that single sentence unfurled into an entire series.
His life changed when he became a father at thirty-four. His wife insisted that their first son bear his name, his namesake though Ricardo had hoped for Vincente. Laughing, he suggested maybe she did it to reduce the chances of divorce; fewer women leave a man when the eldest boy is named after him. I told him women probably should run the world anyway, if only for the sake of order.
His relationship with his own father influenced his work deeply, especially after his son greeted him at the door one evening wearing camouflage clothing and a red paper headdress just like the one Ricardo had made as a boy, and just like the one his father remembered. The generational weight of that moment became one of his recurring symbols. His eldest son, now thirty-three, is also an artist. “The other two are normal humans,” he joked. “Craftsmen. But I have that in me too. I like to make my own brushes. If guilds still existed, I’d join one. Sometimes I tell people I’m a craftsman before I’m an artist.”
Ricardo never needed New York. He found support in Corpus Christi, where he and I showed together in the 1980s at the Kaffie Gallery, one of the most beautiful contemporary spaces in South Texas. Artist and teacher Greg Reuter heard about Ricardo through a friend and showed up at his mother’s door. She yelled, “Ricardo, hay un gringo en la puerta preguntando por ti,” and Greg promptly loaded the young artist’s paintings into his pickup, driving them straight to the Kaffie’s. Director Ben Holland took one look and knew Ricardo’s work would resonate.
Years later, when the gallery closed, Ricardo thanked Ben for his support. In classic Ben fashion he shrugged and said, “Well, I didn’t know if we could sell your work or not, but you were cute.” Ricardo and I laughed so hard we had to pause the interview. Anyone who knew Ben back then understands perfectly.
We talked about what makes someone an artist. Humans are visionaries by nature, but artists are the ones compelled to manifest the vision. Cave painters drawing hunts, hieroglyphs describing conquests, the carved stories on ancient walls—some of us simply must transform the imagination into something you can hold, something that fills the physical and emotional space the way an unwritten melody fills silence.
As for education, initially Ruiz had a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin–Madison but returned home complaining it was just too cold and so began his thirty-seven years as a hospital technician in Corpus Christie that both earned a living and provided healthcare for his mom and eventually his family. Ricardo completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Corpus Christi State University. His studio moved depending on life’s demands, sometimes at his childhood home, sometimes at an aunt’s house, now in a space away from family and dogs and daily distractions. He carved out the time because he had to; the work insisted on being made.
His father died the same year Ricardo had his first show in 1986, and graduate school had to pause so he could support his mother and young family. It wasn’t until 2008 that his life changed dramatically. Museum director Deborah Fullerton called and told him to ask Ben to hang one large painting because Cheech Marin was coming through town with artist Joe Peña. When Cheech visited the studio at K Space, he immediately connected with Ricardo’s work. Marin has since become one of his most devoted collectors, owning more than forty pieces. His followers in Los Angeles found Ricardo through social media, and for years the artist sold nearly everything he produced without having many Texas shows at all.
(Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen)
Works by Ricardo Ruiz, represented in Houston TX by Redbud Arts Center, 303 East 11th Street, Houston, Texas 77008, 713-854-4246, Gus Kopriva, President, gakopriva@aol.com, Tanja Peterson, Executive Director, tanja@redbudartscenter.com
The COVID lockdown intensified his output. Supplies were scarce, so he dug through scraps of Stonehenge paper in the studio. Using Japanese micropens, he worked at a speed that matched the urgency of his dreams. “It’s like making a tattoo,” he said. “Once the ink is down, it’s irrevocable.” Ricardo insists he is “really a painter,” however drawing is now a central part of his practice after 2018.
One image in particular carried both beauty and grief. In 2019 he awoke at three in the morning with a vision of a young woman in a white dress holding a red snake. He sketched it immediately, finished it in the morning, and then understood: it was the daughter he and his wife had lost at five months old in 2008. She would have been twenty-one that year. The red snake, like the red headdress, became one of his recurring symbols, shifting in meaning across time and paintings.
Ricardo’s work is alive with symbolic, mythical, and personal imagery, woven into a narrative vocabulary entirely his own. “I live for the narrative,” he told me.
And it’s true, his paintings and drawings feel like stories he’s compelled to finish, visions that insist on becoming real. His said his life resembles a Ray Romano sitcom at times, with family, dogs, friends, and interruptions swirling around him, but his commitment remains constant. He works because he must, because the act of creation is how he makes sense of the world, and because he has something to say to anyone willing to look.
People often tell him what they think they see in his work. Sometimes they’re wrong, but he doesn’t mind. “As long as they feel something,” he said, “that’s good enough for me.” (word count 1,394)