Bette Ridgeway
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings

Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases that push the boundaries of light, color, and design. Her youth spent in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and her extensive global travel has informed her colorful palette. For the past two decades, the high desert light of Santa Fe, NM has fueled Ridgeway’s art practice.

Her three decades of mentorship by the acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Paul Jenkins set her on her lifetime journey of non-objective painting on large canvas. She explores the interrelation and change of color in various conditions and on a variety of surfaces. Her artistic foundations in line drawing, watercolor, graphic design, and oils gave way to acrylics, which she found to be more versatile for her layering technique. Ridgeway has spent the last thirty years developing her signature technique, called “layering light,” in which she uses many layers of thin, transparent acrylics on linen and canvas to produce a fluidity and viscosity similar to traditional watercolor. Delving further, Ridgeway expanded her work into 3D, joining paint and resin to aluminum and steel with sculptures of minimal towers.

Ridgeway depicts movement in her work, sometimes kinetic and full of emotion, sometimes bold and masterful, sometimes languid and tentative. She sees herself as the channel, the work coming through her, but it is not hers. It goes out into the world—it has a life of its own.

[click on any image to enlarge]

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - Title
Birth of the Blues
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 2
Canyon Winds
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 3
Chroma
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 4
California Dreaming
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 5
Calypso
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 6
Coherence

For over four decades, Bette Ridgeway has exhibited globally with more than eighty prestigious venues, including the Palais Royale, Paris and Embassy of Madagascar. Her awards include Top 60 Contemporary Masters and Leonardo DaVinci Prize. Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Mayo Clinic and Federal Reserve Bank. Her work also appears in International Contemporary Masters and 100 Famous Contemporary Artists. Visit her website at ridgewaystudio.com

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #37.

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