BETTE RIDGEWAY

My paintings are a spontaneous occurrence, born out of the experience, but maturing reflexively in the process of creation. My technique is controlled improvisation. Gravity is my medium. Images are caught with intent.”
– Bette Ridgeway

In her multi-decade career, Bette Ridgeway has exhibited her work globally with over 80 museums, universities and galleries, including recent and upcoming exhibitions at Ocean Galleries; Royal Scottish Academy; Big Screen Plaza, New York; Ventana Fine Art; NYB Gallery; Contemporary Art Collectors; Southwest Gallery; Slate Gray Gallery; London Art Biennale; Swiss Art Expo SBB Eventhall Zürich Main Station; Palais Royale; Women’s Essence/concomitant exhibition at 58th Venice Biennale; Embassy of Madagascar; Slate Gray Gallery; and Shaw Gallery. Ridgeway’s work is in numerous private collections, as well as permanent public placements at the Mayo Clinic, The Boro Building and the Federal Reserve Bank.

Prestigious awards include Michelangelo International Prize, Leonardo DaVinci Prize, Sandro Botticelli Prize and the Top 60 Contemporary Masters.

Her work is featured in many publications, including: Contemporary Art Collectors Magazine; Abstract: Contemporary Magazine; International Contemporary Masters; 100 Famous Contemporary Artists; ArtifactNYC; LandEscape; Art Reveal; MVIBE; Trend; Art Hole, Peripheral ARTeries; ArteryNYC; and Art International Magazine. Italian art critic Salvatore Russo recently wrote an essay on Ridgeway entitled “The True Heir of Paul Jenkins.” Ridgeway has penned several publications about art and process.

Today we can consider the artist Bette Ridgeway as the one and only true heir of Paul Jenkins: her mentor and teacher. Ridgeway’s painting is dynamic and rhythmic; like the most “enlightened” of contemporary composers, Bette traces on canvas what is her ideal score. There is a tacit harmony of color and movement which, through the elegance of the castings, leads the viewer to question the true meaning of art.”

– Dr. Salvatore Russo, art critic, publisher and curator in Rome, Italy
(excerpt from a critical review in 2022)

ARTIST STATEMENT

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 filled have 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 30 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 it comes through her but it is not hers. It goes out into the world – it has a life of its own.