High on Canyon Road, past the galleries selling Southwestern art, lies an oasis of modernism. It is the home of artist Bette Ridgeway, who uses a plastic cup rather than a brush to apply paint to her canvases.
Ridgeway, who celebrated her 80th birthday on Jan. 28, moved to Santa Fe in 1996 from Virginia and has never looked back. Within a week of her arrival, she found a place to live, a studio where she could work and lined up her first gallery show. “It was magic,” she said.
A native of Tupper Lake, New York, a hamlet in the Adirondacks, Ridgeway studied the visual arts with an emphasis on graphic design at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York…