BETTE RIDGWAY is known for her large-scale, luminous poured paintings that explore the thresholds of light, color, and design. Her visual language has been shaped by an early life in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, by decades of travel across cultures and landscapes, and, for the past twenty years, by the singular high-desert light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where her practice has found its most sustained focus.

A pivotal influence in Ridgeway’s artistic formation was her thirty-year mentorship with Abstract Expressionist Paul Jenkins, which set her on a lifelong path toward non-objective painting on a monumental scale. Grounded initially in line drawing, watercolor, graphic design, and oil painting, her work gradually evolved toward acrylics, whose transparency and flexibility proved essential to her process. Over the past three decades, Ridgeway has developed what she calls a technique of “layering light,” building successive veils of thin, translucent acrylic on linen and canvas to achieve a fluidity and depth reminiscent of watercolor, yet with the physical presence of painting.

At the core of her work is an ongoing investigation into how color behaves, shifts, and transforms under varying conditions and across different surfaces. This inquiry has recently extended into three-dimensional forms, where paint and resin are combined with aluminum and steel to create minimalist sculptural towers that translate her painterly concerns into space.

Movement animates Ridgeway’s work, at times kinetic and emotionally charged, at others restrained, deliberate, or tentative. She understands herself not as the owner of the image but as its conduit. The work passes through her, then moves outward, into the world, where it assumes a life of its own.