Lieke Ritman (born 1942) is a prominent, Dutch-born abstract landscape artist and printmaker who has been deeply established in the St Ives artistic community of West Cornwall for over five decades. Her work is highly celebrated for its tranquil, intuitive engagement with the shifting coastal elements, textures, and radiant light characteristic of the Atlantic coast.Ritman was born in the Netherlands in 1942. During her early childhood in 1950, her family emigrated to Australia, where she grew up and was educated in Melbourne. She went on to complete a five-year course in interior design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) before working briefly for the Australian Government. In 1965, she returned to Europe, working across London, Holland, and Spain, which is when she first began experimenting with painting.
Captivated by the unique light and landscape of West Cornwall, Ritman moved permanently to St Ives in 1969. To support herself initially, she worked as a picture framer. However, under the direct encouragement of modernist painter Douglas Portway, she began dedicating herself seriously to her own art. Her trajectory was profoundly shaped by her exposure to iconic British Modernists working in the region, including Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Bryan Pearce, and Kate Nicholson.
Working from her studio in St Ives, Ritman creates semi-abstracted mixed-media paintings, collages, and limited-edition screenprints. Her work is strongly anchored by her daily early morning walks along Cornwall's beaches, estuaries, and moorland paths. Rather than direct documentation, her art focuses on the sensory experience of a place, specifically the rhythmic movement of the ocean, the shifting patterns of white sands, and the distinct, glowing local light. Her aesthetic is widely recognized for its minimalist compositions, subtle textural mark-making, and soft, tranquil color palettes.