Milly Ristvedt

Monet Plane - large, green, modernist, minimalist, abstract, acrylic on canvas

1971

Gradient bands of washed violet turn to dust rose in this shaped canvas from 1968 by Milly Ristvedt. From the first part of her career, this powerful painting is rooted in the tenets...

This intriguing minimalist composition by Pat Service was inspired by her love of road trips and is all about colour and clean, bold shapes. The canvas is saturated with a deep blue ...

This contemporary figurative painting of a swimmer is by Pat Service. In her decades-long and storied career, Canada’s Pat Service has explored a variety of genres, moving from trad...

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...