Ruth Ellen Hoag has been an artist in town for more than 30 years, advocating for Santa Barbara as an ultimate arts destination by creating vast amounts of her own artwork, regularly teaching classes for 25 years, and founding Santa Barbara Studio Artists in 2001. When Hoag’s studio in the Funk Zone doubled in rent during COVID and forced her to leave, it wasn’t until recently that she found a new studio space. REH Gallery, where she displays her figurative and abstract paintings from the last few years, officially opened this month at 12 West Anapamu Street.
Despite Hoag’s longevity as an acrylic and watercolor artist, she began her career as a professional French horn player in her home state, New York, where she graduated from the Manhattan School of Music. For more than 30 years, Hoag continued to play music professionally until her theme-park designer husband, Richard Hoag, was called to work for a year in Japan. “I couldn’t take my horn with me to Japan,” said Hoag. “There wasn’t much point, and when I came back, I totally lost my lip …. But when I was in Japan, that’s when I started painting and doing brushwork in Japanese calligraphy.”
From then on, painting became Hoag’s foremost passion. Her transition from music to painting wasn’t as extreme as one might expect because of the shared language between the two art forms. “In music, you talk about the color of the sound,” said Hoag. “There’s that feeling, the tone. There’s musical repetition and painting repetition. Just about every vocabulary used in music, you can use it in art.” Even so, Hoag never listens to music while she paints because she can get “absorbed” in it. In fact, Hoag explained jovially that she took a wrong turn the other day while listening to the radio.
After transitioning from music to painting, Hoag spent years taking art classes up to four days a week, including adult education courses, classes at SBCC, and annual workshops with her late mentor, Skip Lawrence. Her preferred style and mediums have shifted over the years through this learning process. At first, Hoag was dedicated to watercolor as a medium until she was commissioned to do a mural in the Funk Zone, where she became intrigued by acrylic.
Slowly, Hoag focused her interest on figures and abstract art. “Most of my work, you can see there’s people,” Hoag said. “You can identify things, but if you took the people out, then you wouldn’t have that reference. Everything else around it is pretty much non-objective. It’s not a place that you can identify.” Her focus on figures within an abstract space stems from a personal interest in human relationships rather than in landscape painting.
Much of Hoag’s inspiration is drawn from her travels, where she carries around a sketchbook that she paints from later. However, older women have been a big inspiration for her recently. “There’s always men, always old men, you hear about. But women 80 and 90 years old are doing new work,” said Hoag. “Not even retrospectives, but having new work, having big galleries. It’s liberating.”
After her studio’s closure in the Funk Zone, Hoag struggled to create consistently. She recently learned that the only way to find inspiration is to just keep painting.
“Picasso said inspiration exists, but it must find you working. So, I’m just gonna paint. I’m just gonna paint until I get the inspiration right. It goes along with what you’re doing with your hand, you know,” she said.
You can find Hoag in her gallery from Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., where you will see her most recent artwork and in-gallery studio. Hoag will continue her tradition of hosting in-studio art classes on Mondays and likely on Tuesdays as well, with the occasional pop-up on Saturdays.
REH Contemporary Studio & Gallery is at 12 W. Anapamu Street. For more information, visit ruthellenhoag.com or follow her on Instagram @ruthellenhoag.
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