Lorna Ritz
painting
I am a third generation abstract expressionist-impressionist painter. How can I best express my most passionate realities that landscape offers me (the story beneath ordinary everyday life things), producing on canvas much of what people feel when they get religious? I paint the changing seasons as they occur, the light that emanates from seasonal color combinations that occur in landscape. How does the color define a particular place through the act of painting itself?
My paintings hold in them emotion, spirit, soul, and memory, all of which rise up in oil paint. How colors relate is everything: the color finds the light, creates the shape. A process/improvisational painter, I search for composition through rhythms, harmonies, synchronizations, counterpoints. The more I paint, the more specific these things become.
The general misunderstanding of a painting is due to missing it’s spiritual and technical qualities. If the observer’s eye is not trained to equate formal visual problems with those things, he/she will search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a painting, looking for representational things instead of music-like relationships.
Each of my paintings represents a crystallized chunk of formal experience, while 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.’