Bette Ridgeway, acclaimed for her light-filled, large-scale poured canvas paintings, has spent the last fifty years
perfecting a technique that has earned her both national and international recognition along the way. Her focus
is on pure color. She suspends her canvas on supports then pours layers of acrylic colors of various viscosities,
allowing gravity to dictate a dance of cascading pigment onto the surface and within the threads of each white
canvas. The effects are luminous, capturing movement in its most fleeting, opulent instant. She is not painting
an object or a thing, but rather a moment.
Bette Ridgeway was born in Tupper Lake, a small village in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York
state, a few miles from the Canadian border. Inspired by the pristine and expansive beauty of this six million
square mile natural habitat, she began drawing and painting at a young age.
Ridgeway went on to study visual arts with an emphasis in graphic design at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY.
She was later hired as a professional commercial artist at Reuben H. Donnelley Advertising Corporation. With
its on-the-job training, she received far more substantial instruction than any art school could provide.
In 1979, Paul Jenkins (1923-2012), the renowned Abstract Expressionist, encouraged Ridgeway to produce
large pieces focused on color, space, and time rather than subject matter. Ridgeway took his guidance, honing
her individual means of expression and in 1988 she had her first major solo show at Fota Gallery in Alexandria,
Virginia. Her large, colorful canvases drew an enormous crowd and sold out. That was the beginning of her
long and successful art career.
Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico since 1996, Ridgeway is represented by premier galleries throughout the US
and has participated in more than 80 gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, including a concurrent juried
exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy. Her artwork is held in numerous public and private
collections.
Her most notable accolades include the Leonardo DaVinci International Prize (multiple years), the Caravaggio
International Prize, the Michelangelo International Prize, and recognition as one of Art Tour International
Magazine’s “Top 60 Contemporary Masters.” She received the Oxford University Alumni Prize at the “Art of
the Mind” exhibition at Chianciano Art Museum in Tuscany. Her work has appeared in prominent publications
such as Art Celebrity Magazine, Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, Monk Magazine (UK), LandEscape Art
Review, Special Edition London, and the inaugural London Art Biennale catalogue.
"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 and curator, Effetto Arte Foundation, Rome, Italy.