At the Firehouse Art Gallery: Lorna Ritz

Painting #1

by Lorna Ritz

Painting #3

by Lorna Ritz

painting by Lorna Ritz

Painting #3

by Lorna Ritz

Lorna Ritz

The walls of the Firehouse explode with color and emotion in the current exhibition by Amherst-based abstract expressionist artist, Lorna Ritz. The show will run through September 7, 2008 with a Meet the Artist reception to be held on Saturday, August 23 from 3 to 7 pm during the bi-monthly Newburyport ArtWalk.

One aspect of the exhibit which marks it as unusual is the juxtaposition of Ritz’s very large abstract canvasses with her smaller, more representational series of oil crayon drawings of mountains and apple trees and how they change with the seasons. It is almost like looking at two sides of a coin, held together by a commonality of color palette and passion.

"In my painting, I explore ideas just as an improvisational musician finds his ‘lines’,” Ritz says. “The dialog between ideas lives in me as a fascinating story I'm telling which forms pathways into unknown territory. I want to see what happens through the chance encounters I have with paint. Through this freedom, invention surges and I paint out of curiosity.”

On the other hand, she says, “What I look for when I carry my easel out to the landscape is composition--where a mountain will sit within the space of the four edges of paper in relation to the trees in front of it, clouds behind it. I seek as deep a space as possible, so that when I see the sky move behind the mountain, I simultaneously see the foreground field come up towards me. I study the light of the particular day and follow an inner sense of how the colors will locate this specific light--as though the mountains, the trees, the sky and the shadows from clouds are glowing from within.”

Ritz received a BFA from Pratt Institute,and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, both in painting and sculpture. She has taught at R.I. School of Design, Brown University, University of Minnesota, and Dartmouth College, and continues as a ‘guest critic at the Vermont Studio Center.

She has lectured at the Instituto de Belles Artes, (Medellin, Colombia); American University, (D.C. and in Italy); Humboldt State University, (CA); The New York Studio School, and the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, (France). Through the U.S. Information Agency, she has travelled to Malta and Honduras to teach at universities there.

Her paintings are collected by Bank of Boston, Johnson and Johnson, Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, New Mexico, the Burnham Institute, California, Veridex in New Jersey and Boston law firm, Hale and Dorr.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Huntington Museum in Windsor, Connecticut, as well as The Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, MA., The Creative Center in NYC, and at Gallery Anthony Curtis, Boston, Massachusetts.

Her paintings have also been exhibited at the Divinity Center at Yale University, the Bowery Gallery in NYC, Hillyer Gallery at Smith College, the Fine Arts Center's University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts; the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, MA and, through the Art-in-Embassies Program in Washington D.C. in Africa and Guatemala.

She received a Kittredge Fund Grant from Harvard University and is a three-time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant.

In 2007, through the "International Residency Program" at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, she was chosen as ‘cultural ambassador’ to exchange ideas with artists in South Africa and received The Puffin Foundation Grant to teach a painting workshop to prisoners. So far in 2008 she has received a George Sugarman Foundation Grant and an "Artists’ Fellowship," in New York City.

"In My Head, I'm Thin" is co-produced by the Firehouse and Poolyle Productions.

Visit the artist’s web site