Mother & baby painting by Carlos Lopez Ruiz

The coupling of the mother and baby in the painting captivated me. It was a small oil painting, giving an intimacy to the image of the mother swaddling her child.

I didn’t immediately recognize the artist when I saw the painting on the auction website, but I knew it was one that I wanted to check out at the auction itself. It was hanging among other paintings in a room that held items for a special catalog sale of the high-priced stuff. I wasn’t sure of my chances of getting the painting at a good (as in cheap) price.

The small auction tag on the painting described it as an oil on board size 6.75″ x 4.75″ and in good condition.

The painting was signed “Carlos Lopez Ruiz,” but I had missed the last name when I saw the painting on the website. So I Googled Carlos Lopez and found an artist who painted murals for the Treasury Section of Fine Arts during the Depression. That program, just as the Works Progress Administration, put  artists and other unemployed people to work during the Depression.

I found lots of his artworks and a biography, and then realized that I had missed the last name “Ruiz” in the auction painting. Were they the same person, I wondered. No, they were not, but they lived and worked around the same time. Carlos Lopez was born in Havana, Cuba, but adopted Michigan as his home. Lopez Ruiz was born near Bogota, Colombia, and lived below the border for most of his life.

Born in 1912, Lopez Ruiz began his artistic life as a cartoonist, and his drawings and caricatures were published in several newspapers in Bogota. He became well-known in Colombia for his work.

He had his first showing around 1948 when he exhibited two of his works in a group show of artists from Boyaca, where he lived. By the 1950s, he had migrated to the United States, where he studied at the Corcoran Art School in Washington, and traveled the country to learn from the works of history’s finest artists in galleries and major museums. He also participated in exhibitions in this country and Colombia.

He moved to Ajijic, Mexico, a small town in southwestern part of the country, in 1959 where he met portrait artist Tink Strother – an American transplant – who became his partner both personally and professionally. The couple became part of the local art scene, exhibiting together and apart. Lopez Ruiz, who was said to be a hard drinker, painted local villages and other scenes.

The couple moved to California in the early 1960s, finally settling in Whittier and continuing their exhibitions. They seemed to have parted ways in the late 1960s, with her going off to Europe. He died in 1972 and she in 2007. Here’s both of them in a video of artists who lived in Ajijic in the 1960s and 1970s by a friend who knew them.

I found several of Lopez Ruiz’s works on the web, two with asking prices of $325 and $650, and one that sold at auction in 2011 for $100 and a group of five small ones that sold at auction in 2010 for $165. The first painting showed three women whose faces resembled the woman in the painting at auction.

The auction painting was listed pretty far along in the catalog sale and I did not want to wait around for it to be auctioned. So I Ieft an absentee bid, not knowing who else or how many other people might also want it. I got word the next day that I had won it.

At some point, maybe I’ll come across a painting by the muralist Carlos Lopez.