https://www.gottliebfoundation.org/blog/2025/9/12/individual-support-grant-recipient-forum-artist-residencies
Lorna _Ritz_Paintings_YveYANG-compressed copy YveYANG Gallery, 12 Wooster St., Soho, NYC 10013, will soothe the heat of downtown Manhattan this summer with abstract expressionist views of rural Massachusetts, courtesy of Lorna Ritz, whose debut New York solo exhibition, “Lorna Ritz, Paintings,” opens July 11th, 2025. Opening...
LandEscape Art Review [Lorna Ritz] [92dpi] [link activated] copy...
My little ‘painting performance’ was a hit. My 3-year old and 4-year old grand nieces called out a color for me to paint on the blank canvas. But they had to close their eyes and imagine a color before calling the color out to me....
A month before Alan had that fateful heart attack on the floor at Logan Airport two years ago, he sent me crimson red peony roots. None opened last year. However, two opened today, just moments ago. Here come my beloved peonies, but Alan's first. When...
I disappeared this Autumn to one of the more dangerous cases of tic disease, and Lyme. Spent time in outer space of the telemetry unit of the hospital but within the solid walls of family and friends, called 'Angels.' Past two days were warmer so I...
Writing about the first painting: "I live between two open hayfields that catch the light on them at drastic angles at sunset. I focused only on the reflection of the sky on the hay, which is why there is no sky. It is at that...
After the icy cold winter, in early spring everything comes into blossom. The mountains, which had been a frozen blue-black all winter, is fluffier, a little pinker and pale greener day by day now. I can fall up inside the trees in blossom, my feet...
Lew and Lorna Program Discussion ideas: Intro—conversation about Lew and Lorna’s relationship. How did you meet and how aware have you been of each other’s work? I was the first person Lew met in the Main House at MacDowell Colony when he arrived. I had been picked up...
Lew and I have watched and listened to each other's painting/music since 1972, attending each other's exhibitions and concerts over decades. The idea to compose improvisationally from each other's work Lew jumped on board first. Music moves in a linear way and painting, even though...
Beyond Habitual Seeing: A Meditation in Color...
Painting has become so much more pleasurable than those days back I tried too hard to get it right. Back then, if I was not enjoying the search, I learned to stop painting and rethink what I was after, and then go right there with...
18th July I was in the barn painting yesterday when yet another thunder storm tipped the sky upside down. Rainfall was more like oversized ocean waves hitting my tiny boat, meaning: I felt so small and helpless. All of a sudden a huge, long-lasting flash...
I am doing well because I am painting better; I hardly know what day it is anymore. I always wanted a life like this...
Once a year the Holyoke Mountain Range turns ruby red for a mere three days. The shape of Mt. Norwottuck is very hard to draw for me, but I think I am getting better at it. Tomorrow the mountain range will be grey, since the...
The painting began to become interesting when it was moving forward enough that ideas began to freely present themselves. When I am not certain how to move the paint, I look elsewhere on the canvas, trusting that the hand knows. Then I look back and...
at first I was losing all of me to the dramatic down slide; daily hours at the hospital each day will do that. Then I began sliding 2 hours in the studio each day that I was not there. The hours never increased, but at...
Mt. Norwottuck has a very difficult shape where it meets the sky; I have to search for it each time I draw it. Once I get it, the mountain belongs to me. I always end up at the exact same spot, after carrying my easel...
Everyday, (weather permitting), I am out in the landscape searching for what color the time of day, throughout the day, would form the drawing. As the clouds and light through the clouds hit the hayfield and trees yesterday, everything was in motion all the time....
The sun just did not want to set. Just as the bottom of it touched the top pf the ocean, it squealed with delight, lighting up the thick clouds just above to vermillion. God pulled the sun down further into the ocean whether or not...
It is easier for me to draw ocean waves than to get the shape of Mt. Norwottuck, which I have drawn so many hundreds of times that you'd think it would get easier. The mountain sits right up against the...
The long dark shadows of late summer are heavier than the airiness of the going into summer. I went after the light in the trees, on open hay fields, on the mountains, and in the sky. I fall more in love with what oil paint...
file:///Users/lorna/Desktop/cape/Fowler.webarchive http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/residency-programs-dune-shacks-of-the-peaked-hill-bars-historic-district.htm and: http://www.thecompact.org/index.html 28 April 2013 A one-week artists’ C-Scape Grant Award to reside in a shack without electricity or running water, bound by the Atlantic ocean in the Dunes of Provincetown, MA, was offered to me the last week of April 2013. Artists who are not awarded a...
Only once a year does the Holyoke Mountain Range turn that ruby red that I so love to draw. But now I have to accept the turning of the season that flips the mountains back into their burnished siennas and umber-oranges. The winds and rains...
I am painting much better than a few weeks ago when I spent most the time scraping back down to surface at the end of each day. I was trying to paint the lava flow of 100 square miles, 40 feet deep, from Malpais,...
Leaving the lush yellow-green beginnings of spring for the New Mexico desert brought enormous challenges. After long travel, including a 7 hour flight, (haggling with the car rental agency employer about the ‘toy’ matchbox compact car’ offered me, of which I could not see the...
Good painting comes from the pure pleasure of touching paint and moving it with brushes and pallet knives, mixing it to the exact color range of cools and warms. (I was unable to touch paint for a few months even though I was always drawing....
One has to be a very healthy, strong person to 'just hold tight' while listening to branches crashing onto the side of the house, then thumping heavily onto the earth, one branch after the other, not knowing if a window would be hit or the...
My least favorite job is building stretchers. The corners have to be exactly right-angled and there are 6 paintings to build. I got three corners perfect and then one is off. I fix that one and the others are off. Finally all corners are...
The sky got really so dark that I could not see color, late afternoon. By sunset the heavy rain had stopped and I was able to go for my usual sunset walk. Upon my return, I ran back into the barn to look at...
"Yesterday we walked between rainstorms along the shores of Goats Neck Beach and then Wrights Beach. I loved one beach right after the other. Goat’s has the mouth of the Russian River running into the ocean. Birds float on it’s current like little kids going...
Mid-day was warm enough, but then as the sun suddenly dropped at 4pm, coldness set in quickly before I was finished drawing, crayons dropping from frozen fingers that did not even seem to belong to me. I never quite remember the light being as sharp...
At 4:40 am when I got up to get ready for bed, (having fallen asleep dressed), I heard the first birdsong of the morning: one crystal clear 'full-sentence' undulating melody. Within minutes came a myriad of call-and response songs from all sides of my house...
The staff at the Funeral Home is beginning to look like relatives. I hope we don't have to return for a good long while yet. My sister pointed to where I have a plot; she said she'd 'be right next to me,' to which I...
Lorna Ritz and her pet, Kukumba, who she says is "not really a cat, but something I dreamt up." Photo courtesy of Mark Prince Visual artist Lorna J. Ritz has announced there will be an upcoming show of her work at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack,...
The way I work, one painting begets the one yet to come. The paintings grow out of each other. My paintings come from the things around me that I see, such as ancient mountains, (the...
“In Northampton some one went around lighting houses on fire while people slept around Christmas time, one right after the other. People died, and some lost their houses. Everyone was so nervous to sleep at night, but the arsonist was caught and confessed. The community...
Painting and Life Writings "My introduction to Jim Gahagan came as an undergraduate student of his at Pratt Institute in the 60's. I was also studying realist painting under Lennart Anderson at the Art Students League. I felt frustrated because something in me was not getting...
I only know winter is here because I succumbed to unpacking my Jeep of my portable outdoor studio, (drawing boards, two easels, stacks of oil crayons, paper, and recycled frames for new drawings). Three days in a row I set my easel up, only to...
I took students of mine to the Smith College Art Museum. One of the paintings I talked about the longest time is Monet's 'Poppy Fields,' forgetting even that the students were there. As I studied the painting, I made discoveries in this same painting I...
South Africa has a most perfect balance of beauty and danger, (to the extremes of both), coupled with an imbalance between wealth and poverty, where anti-apartheid is still new, so society continues to act it out in subtle ways. For example, late this afternoon I...