That particular schlepping may have ended, but as inveterate travelers Ruff and Brown still move around quite a bit. "I've always had visions of faraway places in my head," says Brown, who just returned from a short visit to London while Ruff was off in St. Petersburg, Russia. They've both journeyed throughout Europe, South America, Asia, and India.
When Brown remarried two years ago, she moved to Hamden, Connecticut, about an hour and a half from Chappaqua. As a result, each woman now has her own studio, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Though the partners obviously enjoy each other's company and share humor and a close history -- they say they can talk nonstop all day long when given the opportunity -- they realized that two people can't really work simultaneously on the same map. However, they do consult on the phone daily and meet twice a month.
Separate studios allow individual time to think, research, sketch, make compositional drawings, and do much of the actual work. They use T-squares, acrylics (which they mix themselves), umber (to give the maps an old-fashioned feel), and unstretched canvas. Their cartographic techniques also tend to be low-tech and intuitive. "Over the years we've learned how to reconcile scales, if that problem comes up," says Brown. "That's essential, but mechanical. The rest, the aesthetics, took forever to master -- print and script styles, for instance. We studied them in map after map and then practiced them for hours and hours to get to the point where it's second-nature freehand."
She adds, "Every element -- cartouches, compass roses, borders -- we examined and practiced in the same labor-intensive way. Certain extrapolations hit us as we learned that we could employ the colors and design motifs of the place we were mapping -- China, India, Cuba -- to good effect. Cartographers used to do that to a limited degree, but not as an organizing principle." In a Chinese map, for example, instead of using Western-European-Renaissance decorative motifs, they utilized, more appropriately, Eastern ones, including Chinese key borders and a chop (seal).
Brown and Ruff definitely are not fuddy-duddies, but they do believe strongly in the pleasures of slower-paced methods. "We look back and we're grateful that our pace was unhurried," notes Brown. "We needed time to practice all this stuff and to allow ideas to percolate. There is some virtue in doing things by hand in the twenty-first century."
Looking around her studio, even a casual visitor notices the Shaker-like simplicity and lack of fussiness. Reference books include the well-thumbed
Grammar of Ornament, by Owen Jones,
British Country Maps, by Yasha Beresiner, and examples of eighteenth-century American maps from Douglas Marshall's
Campaigns of the American Revolution: An Atlas of Manuscript Maps that Brown and Ruff extol for their subtlety and delicacy. "We like these maps because they were done on the go and made, not printed," explains Brown. "They're all handwork."
In fact, the handwork nature of their own maps and the resulting low production numbers suit them just fine. Redstone Studios finishes around thirty maps a year, and they're booked through 2000. "It's just the two of us," says Ruff, who affirms that it will remain that way. "We work well together. Our aesthetic has merged. We have fun. We're not going to start a factory."
