Washes of sun yellow are edged in dashes of bright colors - mauve, cerise, lime and rust -- in this monumental color-field canvas by Milly Ristvedt. "Summer Window" from 1973 was created in the early years of this important artist's career.
"The earliest of Ristvedt's pictures...dating from the early 70s are already characterized by a fascination with color which has continued to the present. These paintings demonstrate Ristvedt's efforts to find simplified formats which allow color to operate freely. Her admiration for such modern masters as Henri Matisse, Jack Bush and, to some extent, Jules Olitski, is evident, but her pictures are not overly derived from any of these painters. Instead they suggest sympathetic acceptance of modernist ideas about color, structure and space. Following the example of the artists she admires, she built her early pictures out of brilliant saturated color, spread across the continuous expanse of the flat canvas."
From Karen Wilken, "Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade" (Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1979).
Milly Ristvedt (b. 1942, Kimberley, BC) MA, RCA, began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe at the Vancouver School of Art. At 24, her work was included in the Centennial Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and featured at the National Gallery of Canada. She was chosen for prestigious exhibitions in Winnipeg, Paris and Lausanne. By 1969, Ristvedt was painting large canvases, sharing a studio with Jack Bush and showing with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. That same year, Barry Lord observed in Art in America that Ristvedt’s paintings were “…more insistent than Bush, more consciously structured than Molinari.”
Over her long career, Ristvedt has had over 50 solo exhibitions. An advocate for artist's rights, Ristvedt was awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. She completed an MA in Art History at Queen's University in 2011.
Ristvedt's abstract, acrylic canvases are held in private, corporate and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Harvard University.
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