Ruth Van Order is an artist who specializes in colored pencil portraits and large, intricately detailed maps and abstract works. She creates lively and vibrant portrayals of celebrities and other people she is interested in, guiding the viewer to examine the people as more than just people. She also dedicates extended amounts of time studying maps and layouts of places she connects with, remaking the designs in her own style and creating an interconnected narrative with an idealized view of a future utopia.

Ruth often works on standard grid paper and tapes it together to create massive works, completely covering them in tape once finished to protect the work.

For more information on Ruth Van Order, visit her page on Outpost 1000 here.

Read articles featuring Ruth on Eugene Weekly:

"Slant: Defense of Truth and the Dog Ban"

"Welcome to the Accidental Art Hotel"

"Van Order works tirelessly on an ever-expanding, constantly evolving map that depicts a colorful utopia in which energy is clean, food is healthy and plentiful, schools are good and medicine is free to those in need. She’s been building her own perfect world out of graph paper and Scotch tape for more than a couple years now. It’s grown so vast over that time that it takes at least two people to safely unfold it. Van Order says: 'It will be done when I die.' "

- Eugene Weekly