RAiR | 1975
Lorna Ritz
Abstract Expressionist Lorna Ritz (1947 ) studied painting and sculpture to earn her BFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 1969 and MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1971. She received a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1968. In 1981, Lorna was awarded a Blanche E. Colman Award in Boston and traveled the US and the world participating in artist grants and awards well into the early 2000s. Ritz was awarded an Esther & Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant in 2018. International residencies included Italy, South Africa, France, Malta, and Colombia. She taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, University of Minnesota, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Gretna School of Art. Her work is collected by University of Michigan's Museum of Contemporary Art; Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles; and the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts.
“In my painting I explore ideas just as an improvisational musician finds his "lines." The dialog between ideas lives in me like a fascinating story I'm telling, forming pathways into unknown territory, I want to see what happens through the "chance encounters" I have with paint. Free like this, invention surges up and I paint out of curiosity: A problem area in the painting becomes a foreign country in which to travel, to explore new territory in the painting. I continue to strengthen the major concept as it is forming and on its way to becoming "whole." I can never quite get there, but I get closer to each painting as I develop my skill. I enjoy the struggle and the search, reaching for the inaccessible.
I document how time passes through the evolution of the paintings. I have consistently chosen a life-style that would set aside time to concentrate on the painting so that ideas could flow. I practice my skill just as one would practice a musical instrument; to be there when this 'thing' called ‘revelation’ comes. This way of life is my freedom, moving beyond self and plunging into the ecstasy of what I can do next with color and paint. My mind holds an empty, silent space from which I can receive ideas that fall onto the canvas, without my willful interference. I can see what resonates and what doesn‘t. Each placement of color is with this inner awareness, is with the intent to express deep feeling.
My creative process entails a whole lot of editing, (scraping and reapplying paint). I feel like I am at a construction site breathing life onto the canvas through a simultaneous building up and a tearing down of color. I paint and I scrape and I then repaint. The surfaces of my paintings resemble ancient walls, in that there is a sense of history alive on them , through the repetition of the "placement and replacement" of paint many times over. The entire painting, in the end, has it’s own specific inner luminosity, and its own presence.
Each of my paintings represents a crystallized chunk of formal experience, as well as being very personal at the same time. My paintings are earthy, rock-like and weighty, and yet they have in them the rhythm of the sea. I am a nature painter; the nature "out there" coupled with my own internal landscape. My "inner" finds the equivalent "out there."
I search for the structure and form through the relationship of colors. I am interested in the vibration that occurs when the edge of one color touches that of another. They define each other through their intrinsic differences, of a particular quality that allows them to pull apart spatially, creating the illusion of depth on the flat surface of linen. No area is flat, or empty. The space is the life force of the painting throughout all four edges; it is large, and vast and deep and does not appear to have an end. Everything that exists is in direct relationship with everything else at all times. Newly discovered color relationships come from landscape, always from memory. For me, color is a temperature- range experience. My paintings are seasonal, as well as informative about how light falls on the open fields and on the mountains where I live, at different times of day. The paintings also suddenly and unexpectedly recall landscapes where I have traveled which might suddenly be recalled through paint,(ones that I was not even aware I had remembered).
I am a painter of space and light, two ephemeral elements that transcend object. Each painting has its own specific inner-light through the relationships of the colors emanating off the mountains and from the sky. The mountains where I live most often draw themselves with thick blue-black paint in those forever-slow, undulating curves. The landscape reveals itself in unexpected ways like that. The landscape is like an animal observing you, a presence you feel. As you face it you find that sense of place from within your own self, like an animal that has risen up and sat back down, (as the light pulsates through fast-moving, low-hanging clouds on the mountains), and you wonder, "What just happened?" These mountains are like large wild animals you can reach out and pet. They are warm and fuzzy and totally joyful in their redness at this time of year. The rolling orange-red mountains are so alive from the dispersion of pieces of sunlight up against deep dark sensuous curves of blues from the cloud shadows. They pulsate back and forth, constantly changing, like light on water.”
AMoCA Collection: Untitled, 1980, oil on canvas, 66.5 x 74.5.