Bette Ridgeway

Trained as a watercolorist, Bette Ridgeway began her love affair with water media in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York, where she grew up. She has traveled the globe; painting, teaching, exhibitting her work...while embracing the colors and customs of very diverse cultures in Africa, Australia, Europe, Asia and Latin America. (read more)

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Her formal education at Russell Sage College, New York School of Interior Design and the Art Students League gave her basic training in the use of materials and techniques. Her personal style was a long time in development.

"One must transcend technique so that the art reveals itself on the canvas. As soon as we reflect, deliberate or conceptualize, the original unconsciousness is lost and a thought interferes...Great works are created when we are able to release the child within us...the child unemcumbered the self."

Bette Ridgeway's signature is color. In her transparent, multi-layered paintings, she builds armatures out of wood. In this way she is agble to control the shapes and directions of each flow. The process is physically laborous and each painting takes many weeks to complete. It might take two hours to construct the armature for a single flow of paint. Sometimes the paint is allowed to dry between layering and sometimes the colors are flowed together. "The movement that occurs is so beautiful. I really get into the process. It is like entering into another world--a world of mind, of space...of something beyond.