It has taken Bette Ridgeway 17 years to perfect her control of the pour, which she has learned to route by building wooden armatures that direct the paint across chosen areas of the canvas.

Effects are varied by what Ridgeway does with her pour – sometimes only a single color is used, sometimes several at once. The consequences of this simultaneously directed and random activity emphasize rhythm and motion.

Ridgeway’s signature is color. In her transparent, multi-layered paintings, she builds armatures out of wood. In this way she is able to control the shapes and directions of each flow. The process is physically laborious 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.”

“The strong feeling emanating from these paintings cannot be denied.” — Jonathan Goodman