Bette Ridgeway

Sounds of the Sea

Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases, which, in recent years have garnered the artist international recognition. She describes her process as a layering light. Among her international awards, "International Prize - 2019 Artist of the Year" presented in Mantua, Italy, in June 2019, "WAA 2019 "Women's Essence" at the Venice, Biennale, in May 2019, and Art Tour International Magazine’s “Top 60 Contemporary Masters.” In 2016, she received the prestigious Leonardo DaVinci prize in Rome, Italy. Also, she won 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 at the Gagliardi Gallery in London in April 2013. Trained as a watercolorist, Ridgeway's love affair with water media began as a youngster growing up in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York (only a few miles from Canada), where she was surrounded by the beauty of nature. Informed by this early experience, she has traveled the globe, studying, painting, teaching and exhibiting her work, while embracing the customs and colors of the diverse cultures of Africa, Australia, Europe, Asia, Mexico and South America. Ridgeway’s formal art studies at Russell Sage College, New York School of Interior Design and the Art Students League gave her the basic tools in the use of materials and techniques Her personal style, however, was a long time in development. Always an artist, she postponed her art career to raise her family and hold a job. While working in Washington DC as CEO of Very Special Arts, an educational affiliate of the JF Kennedy Center, which provides arts programs for disabled children and youth, she was fortunate to meet the internationally acclaimed artist, Paul Jenkins. This was a life-changing experience. Jenkins became a friend and mentor, encouraging the artist to work large and focus on color, space and time. He once jokingly referred to his paintings as chaos and Ridgeway’s as controlled chaos. Ridgeway took Jenkins’ advice and has spent the last 30 years developing her signature technique in which she uses many layers of thin, transparent acrylics on linen and canvas to produce a fluidity and viscosity similar to traditional watercolor. The effect is both sensual and powerful.