C Major

About C Major

Ristvedt works as comfortably in a hard-edge methodology as she does in a fluid, more gestural style. The hard-edge painting, C Major is tuned perfectly. A master at letting go and allowing form to indicate colour, Ristvedt allows her painting process to suggest colour relationships as she progresses. C Major brings unusual colours into seamless harmony with one another.

Milly Ristvedt (b. 1942, Kimberley, BC) MA, RCA, began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe and Roy Kiyooka at the Vancouver School of Art. Ristvedt credits Tanabe with helping her refine her ability to see in first year composition, and Roy Kiyooka as her most important educational influence. Kiyooka introduced Ristvedt to the paintings of contemporary artists such as Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Morris Louis who were working in series. This altered Ristvedt's approach to production in the early years. However, while Ristvedt admires the discipline of seriality she prefers to set her parameters after the fact thus allowing exciting and unexpected changes to reveal themselves through the course of painting.

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."