Lori Ridgeway

I am a landscape oil painter living in Ottawa, Ontario. However, my interest and aesthetic were mainly shaped by my years spent in the high backcountry of the Rocky Mountains. It is where I first explicitly thought about the dazzle of light and shadow, colour, and even scent and sound that created my sense and memory of immediate ‘place’, which stopped me in my tracks as often or more so than the incomparable vistas. This sense of ‘immediate place’ remains the source of my painting inspiration where I now live. My creative focus on the nearer landscape is also the result of years of professional immersion in making sense and order from the complexity that underlies superficial impressions, rather than overlooking it. I want to share how I see the patterns in nature and landscape revealed by lines, shapes, colour and light and shadow — the very weft and warp of the fabric of our surroundings. I want to capture and amplify, through mark-making and colour, that which often escapes everyday notice — the contrasts of line and gesture, positive and negative shapes and colour to create interest, texture, depth and movement in my paintings. I am more interested in the push and pull of colour and shape for depth than the traditional perspectives of distant vistas. Increasingly, colour, light and rhythm are my actual subject. My impressions draw especially from trees, branches, grasses, and shorelines, including reflections, with a goal to make extraordinary moments from ordinary ones. I use traditional oil paints to amplify marks and various forms of contrast to draw the eye on a path that is intended to be savoured slowly, but which ultimately adds to a whole. My paintings are intended to be abstracted but believable. I paint mainly in medium or large format.