BY SUSAN LUDMER-GLIEBE
Julie Ruff and Connie Brown admit that they didn't have a clue why two hippopotamuses should be swimming in the Atlantic Ocean en route to the New Jersey shore. It was all part of a day's --Actually several weeks' -- work. If hippos had some deep significance for their clients, a couple from Connecticut, then they were more than happy to oblige. Granted, the animals they painted on their canvas weren't the mythic creatures of a medieval bestiary, but they did somehow belong to the iconographic tradition that played a significant role in cartographic history.
Ruff and Brown, who own and operate Redstone Studios, are modern mapmakers with a lively, not-quite-irreverent-but-close-to-it approach to their work. But they utilize a formal, discursive, representative style that goes back centuries. The maps they make are geographically accurate (except for one where France and England abut Connecticut's Long Island Sound, but that's another story). And they fill their work with traditional decorative and cartographic conventions, such as cartouches, keys, inserts, and even a wind rose or two.
Ruff and Brown have produced maps of road trips, honeymoons, cruises, family adventures, successful marathon runs, family trees, wine tours, and maiden airplane voyages. "They're commemorative maps," says Brown. "No, they're more custom maps," counters Ruff in the easy banter the two constantly engage in. By whatever name, the maps they make are one-of-a-kind and very personal.
Paul Theroux wrote, "Cartography, the most aesthetically pleasing of the sciences, draws its power from the greatest of man's gifts -- courage, the spirit of inquiry, artistic skill, man's sense of order and design, his understanding of natural laws, and his capacity for singular journeys to the most distant places." It's a sentiment seconded by Ruff and Brown, but one they explain more simply. "Maps represent that borderline between art and science," they have noted, "and it is that area that interests us most."
