I only recently came across Boo Ritson, but i wish i found her sooner her work is amazing. Her real life paintings? I dont know what to call them, people? Buy anyway, she gets real life people and completly changes them into a piece of art. She drops blobs of paints of them, and blends and paints until she gets the look she was going for. They are like her canvas. which i think is amazing, a breath of fresh air for the artworld! “I think about the topography of the face and how that might impact on the painting, either as an awkwardness, as a unifying thing, or as a mixture of both and take it from there,” explains Ritson.
Of course she can keep her art works like that if she has an exhibition, but normally she has pictures taken of them,“When I’ve finished painting the person, the work sits in space, image on object, and it has the clarity of definition you would expect from an object in space. At the point that the documentation starts, I then continue to work on the painting for a short time while referring to the image on [my computer] screen.”
“I like to paint people I know,” she continues. “Especially those I have painted before, because I can take my understanding of the way paint sits on their surface a bit further each time. I choose new people for the way they fit a particular character, so for height, bone-structure etc. For this show, as I’m exploring a new way of working, I have used very few new sitters.”
Ritsons work in her newer parts of work have seen her move away from the super bright images she used to create. Just by cutting down the white and only keeping a small white section within the images. “Earlier this year I became very interested in unfinished portraits and how they communicate differently from works where the artists has covered the canvas, making the illusion complete,” she explains. I started from the assumption that I would be choosing to use areas of colour that were ‘finished’ and then painting larger areas of white that were ‘unfinished’: it gave me a new way to look at how and where I would use colour, one that started to develop a language of shapes and their relationships to each other.”
There we go, what did you think?
Thanks xo
seamsandstitches 