Milly Ristvedt

April Sunny Day - large, bright, colourful, gestural abstract, acrylic on canvas

1988

Horizontal bars of blue, maroon, cherry red, pink, lemon yellow, burnt orange and green communicate on a soaked sand-coloured ground in the two panels that form this 9-foot square acrylic diptych painting on canvas. The rhythm of the spaces between the short lengths of colour creates a dialogue of movement that leads the eye upwards through the large picture plane. About the inspiration for the work, the artist wrote: "This is one of the rare paintings that I saw clearly in a dream and painted almost exactly as I saw it. It relates back to the four-panel work, Lock-Up (1972), done a couple of months earlier, where I used the physical break between panels as an edge to anchor some colour bars. In Phoenix, some bars are anchored while others float within the larger ground colour." This painting was included in the exhibition catalogue Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade (1979). Milly Ristvedt, RCA, began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe at the Vancouver School of Art. In Toronto, during the 1960s and 1970s, she was making and exhibiting large-scale paintings alongside a small but defined group of non-figurative painters who, like Ristvedt, had planted...

This contemporary abstract painting by Milly Ristvedt is expressed in geometric form. The power of pure colour and minimal form is masterfully displayed in this abstract painting by...

Milly Ristvedt has captured, in vivid colour, and expressive form the wonders of the ‘deep’ in this gorgeous abstract painting. Against a rich blue colour field, ethereal forms and g...

Capturing the energy and innovation of a jazz tune, this vividly coloured abstract painting is by Milly Ristvedt. Swatches of orange, violet, turquoise and black appear in a rhythmic...