Life and Inspirations
Ruth Pilkington led an extraordinary life and was a talented and prolific artist for the majority of her 100 years.
Her experience ranged from a 17-year-old recruit with the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War – convoyed to Sri Lanka to intercept and decode enemy signals for analysis at Bletchley Park – to young wife and mother in post-War Plymouth to South African emigrant.
Throughout her life, her passion and talent for painting grew. Ruth trained in sign-writing at the Johannesburg Technical College and later, on returning to the UK, studied Fine Art at Macclesfield College of Further Education.
In the late 1960s Ruth and her beloved husband, Eric, and their teenage children, Chris and Sue, made Jersey their home and her most productive artistic period began.
Her work often explored contrasts in light and shape in urban and natural scenes. Jersey’s coastline, townscapes and lanes were a frequent source of inspiration as were memories of the broad sweep of the South African veldt and travels with Eric in Greece.
Ruth worked mostly in oil, painting directly onto canvas using an underpainting of single colour wash to capture tones of changing light or tidal conditions but she also explored mixed media and etching.
During her life she exhibited with the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, Salon International des Beaux Arts in Paris, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, of which she was made an honorary senior member in 2020. She was also made an honorary member of the Society of Women Artists.
Ruth’s first solo exhibition in Jersey was held in 1976 and in 1988 Jersey Heritage commissioned her to mark the flooding of Queen’s Valley with a painting for their permanent collection.
Her painting slowed following, first, the death of her husband, Eric, in 1983 and then subsequently of both her son, Christopher, and daughter, Susan, in 1992 and 2005, respectively. Although she refused to be bowed by grief, it had a lasting impact on her production of paintings and her further development as an artist.
Over the course of her career as an artist, she produced some 140 pieces of work, the vast majority of which were sold or gifted during her life and a number of her paintings are held in the permanent collection of Jersey Heritage.
