Richard Armendariz: Tell Me Where it Hurts I Ruiz-Healy Art

From the outset of his career, nearly twenty-five years ago, he struck on an artistic persona that is an amalgam of artist, artisan, insurrectionist, and visionary, combining an ever more refined technical mastery of painting with an arduous practice of “crating” his works, whether seeking out synthetic materials to etch upon that will achieve a greater granular idelity for his block prints, or painstakingly wielding an industrial router to bevel and ornament his canny, mythic, and sometimes unsettling, narrative painted scenarios. He merged his long training as a painter with an early mastery of stone masonry (a vocation he practiced in Colorado), perhaps making it inevitable that his works would be exquisitely drawn, painted and carved.