Ruth Speer

  1. A silver-haired woman rides through the air on the back of a half-bird, half-man over a vast landscape.
    Caption
    A Heart's a Heavy Burden, Ruth Speer, 2023, oil on wood, 24 x 30 inches

    I work with human-animal hybrids a lot, and fantasy feels like it can itself be a two-headed beast, peering from one world into the other while sharing a single internal system. As Ursula le Guin wrote, “It is by such statements as, ”Once upon a time there was a dragon,” or ”In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”--it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.”

    ©the artist