Pearls of wisdom — or just a smile for the day — may pop up in the most unexpected places. A coffee house, for instance. Particularly when someone like Ruthe Guerry injects a playful artistic side into the vibe.
From the time she was in third grade, Guerry was sure she wanted to grow up to be a forensic pathologist. She even pursued that path into college, at Mississippi University for Women. Somewhere along the way, however, a new calling surfaced. Turns out, Ruthe Guerry was a good artist.
During a hiatus from the classroom, the Columbus native became a youth minister, mentoring and counseling, and doing a lot of public speaking. Her art found its way into all of it as a visual for her audiences, and especially for the youth she worked with.
“I found a way to combine the counseling that I really enjoyed as a youth minister and the art,” she said.
When Guerry began decorating her office with her own artwork and discovered people wanted to buy it, “it finally dawned on me that I should be doing this,” she said.
School beckoned again, and she graduated from The W in 2014 with a degree in studio art. Her watercolors, screen prints and mixed media works have been seen in several gallery shows. She will be a featured artist in a unique statewide collaborative exhibit called Splinter, in Columbus in spring 2016. The next phase planned is graduate school, with the goal of becoming an art therapist. Guerry’s sights are turned toward the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For the present, she can be found on staff at Coffee House on 5th in downtown Columbus, where she used a fleeting medium to render these chalkboard canvases.
It may not be the fine art she is accustomed to creating elsewhere, Guerry said, “but I’m having fun with it — and I get to play with chalk!”
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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