Ruth Poniarski didn’t start out with a paintbrush. Her early years were rooted in design and construction—she earned her degree in architecture from Pratt Institute in 1982 and spent a decade working in the field. But over time, she found herself drawn to something less rigid, more expressive. In 1988, she made a shift. Painting offered a new way to think—one that didn’t require measurements or blueprints. It gave her room to build with memory, story, and emotion instead of steel and concrete. Her paintings blend the surreal with the symbolic, pulling inspiration from myths, literature, and the deeper questions we carry. She doesn’t spell things out. Instead, her work invites quiet thought, offering layers to explore.
Three pieces—The Second Wave, The Birth of Venus, and Bather’s Invention—capture that openness. Each one offers a small, dreamlike world, rich in metaphor and grounded in feeling.
The Second Wave suggests a moment of quiet change. A wave rises, and something watches—maybe a creature, maybe a part of ourselves. A trace from the past begins to vanish, absorbed by wet sand. What follows isn’t chaos but continuation. A second wave rolls in, gentle but sure. There’s a rhythm to it—loss, pause, return. Poniarski paints this with soft transitions and flowing lines. The ocean doesn’t just move; it remembers. The painting isn’t about a physical place so much as a process—how something ends, and something else quietly begins.
The Birth of Venus steps into a familiar myth but takes its own path. The shell drifts ashore, a vehicle for arrival, but Venus isn’t standing in triumph. She’s caught in the in-between. There’s space in the painting, as if she’s just beginning to notice where she is. The sea behind her doesn’t just push forward—it feels like time stretching across the canvas. In this version, Venus is not a fixed symbol of beauty. She’s a process, unfolding. The mood is thoughtful, even hesitant. Here, emergence isn’t a spectacle—it’s a slow recognition of presence.
In Bather’s Invention, the scene shifts to a dense natural setting. A hollow tree, mushrooms, a fall of water—it’s peaceful but layered with suggestion. A lion stands nearby, not as a threat, but as a kind of guardian. Eve appears, tending to the water with care, preparing herself. The moon lights the scene, steady and practical. The painting feels like a small ritual in progress. Everything in the space seems tied together—land, body, water, light. There’s no rush. No noise. Just a gentle readiness. Poniarski captures not just an act of bathing, but a kind of communion with place. It’s personal, even sacred.
All three pieces follow a similar approach: layered symbolism, natural imagery, mythic touchpoints. But nothing is explained outright. That’s part of the appeal. Poniarski doesn’t treat myth as fixed truth. She uses it like language—open-ended, adaptable, rooted in emotion. A wave might be memory. A bath might be healing. A shell might be the edge of something new. Meaning shifts, depending on who’s looking.
That openness carries over from her background. Architecture taught her structure and balance. You can still feel that grounding in her compositions. But painting gave her permission to loosen those lines, to let emotion take up more space. Instead of defining the world, she paints around it—offering fragments, shapes, and stories that ask to be held rather than solved.
Poniarski’s paintings don’t deliver clear conclusions. They give you something else—a place to pause. A place to wonder. Each image feels like a moment suspended between what was and what could be. And maybe that’s where her work lives best—in the small, quiet space between structure and feeling.
