b'Nadine M. Orenstein: Describe your earlygets older, it gets richer. The beauty of the col-years and when you first became interested in art. ors alone is seductive. Janet K. Ruttenberg: My mother used to tellNMO: What was your artistic training?the story that I would stare from my crib at the Drer print that was hanging in the nursery.JKR: As an adult, while living in Chicago, I Kindergartenismyfirstrecollectionofthewasluckytohaveknownthephotographer struggle to express a visual image, somethingHarry Callahan and to be in one of his classes. that has always stayed with me. For a drawingAlso, at that time, I had a one-on-one lesson or assignment, I drew what started out as a prim- two with a sculptor who taught me how to chip itive stick figure, and it emerged, with muchaway at marble and weld. I also did bookbinding erasing and subsequent holes in the paper, intoand paper-making with the Hungarian book-afullyarticulatedandsophisticatedhumanbinder Elizabeth Kner. Along the way I did a lot body. The teacher, I remember, picked up theof work with Allen Saalburg, the great silkscreen drawing and said: This is absolutely amazing.artist. During my early years in Dubuque, Iowa, I took private art lessons after school each day NMO: You were interested in art from earlyfrom Sister Mary James Anne at Clark College. on, but what were the early influences on yourMy grade-school art teacher, Miss Bechtel, and wanting to become an artist? I would paint together out and about on the weekends.Throughoutmychildhood,Iwas JKR: In 1936, when I was five years old, mytrained by uncle Buck in the discipline of Old uncle Buck Warshawsky, an artist, brought meMasteroilpaintingtechniques.WhenIwas a gift of a little box of oil paints from Paris about eight, I began to spend summers studying which I still have. Many years later, while vis- inadvancedprogramsattheArtInstituteof itingParisasanadult,IdiscoveredLefeb- Chicago. One of the teachers, LeRoy Neiman, vre-Foinet, the best of all oil paints. I saw theused to chase me around the bowels of the Art label and realized that this was the same brandInstitute. He scared me half out of my wits. I of paint that was in the little box that had beenmet him later as an adult and we had a good a gift from Buck so long ago. One of the dis- chuckle about that. I left Dubuque at the age of tinctions of Lefebvre-Foinet paint is that as it14 for the Emma Willard Boarding School in'