Bette Ridgeway  contemporary colorist

Pushing the boundaries of light, color and design, Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases. Her newest works celebrate her mastery of color and light on both canvas and metal.  The work on aluminum and steel is layered with hand-fired resin, creating a glass-like quality that has garnered the artist international recognition.

The recipient of numerous awards, her work is featured in “60 Top Contemporary Masters 2016” Art Tour Magazine and the International DaVinci Prize Rome, Jan 2016. She was awarded the Oxford University Alumni Prize at the “Art of the Mind” exhibition at the Chianciano Art Museum in Tuscany in 2012. She participated in the inaugural London Art Biennale in January of 2013 and showed at the Gagliardi Gallery in London in April 2013. She was runner-up for the Best in Show award at “Art Comes Alive” international competition sponsored by Art Design Consultants in June 2013.

“My paintings are a carefully observed negotiation, manipulated layer upon layer in order to create a work of art as equivalent as possible to the complexity of real life. They are an attempt to control the almost uncontrollable substance that is swirling, poured paint, and the equally untamable expression of the human condition”.  A critic described my work as ‘feeling like an image of arrested motion, poised to flare into movement as soon as one turns away’ which says it all”. 

In the catalog for the artist’s Millennium Exhibition in NYC, Laurence F. Johnson, AACR, the Curator of the John Deere Corporate Collection wrote, “The paintings really stunned me. They went off in my head with a psychedelic big-bang, forming a universe of kaleidoscopic stop-frame action of a thousand frames a millisecond. A billion light years of searching sound filled the hemispheres of my mind”. The Deere Collection has acquired 3 large Ridgeway poured paintings over the years.

Her fashion collaboration with Japanese designer, Mihara Yasuhiro, gained her an international following. The 2013 spring/summer womenswear collection was presented at Galerie Joyce in Palais Royale during the Paris fashion week in October 2012. The designer selected many of the artist’s paintings and incorporated them into the fashions. The clothing is found in high-end boutiques throughout Europe and Asia.

“Infusing the work on a variety of surfaces with transparent color combinations presents me with incredible challenges,” says Ridgeway, “along with very deep rewards”.

The artist enjoys working with designers and architects to create site-specific artwork.