Summer Window

About Summer Window

Washes of sun yellow are edged in dashes of bright colours - mauve, cerise, lime and rust -- in this monumental colour-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 colour which has continued to the present. These paintings demonstrate Ristvedt's efforts to find simplified formats which allow colour 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 colour, structure and space. Following the example of the artists she admires, she built her early pictures out of brilliant saturated colour, spread across the continuous expanse of the flat canvas."

From Karen Wilken, "Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade" (Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1979).