Lieke Ritman - Eighty!

We are delighted to be showing a very special collection of works by Lieke Ritman to celebrate her eightieth year!

Lieke Ritman’s career as an artist is one enriched by international study, and a lifelong engagement with the art and artists of St Ives. Lieke, now in her 80th year, was born in the Netherlands. She studied interior design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and in 1968 she was invited to stay in St Ives by artists Douglas Portway and Betty Holman. Captivated by the beauty and special light of Cornwall, she stayed, setting herself up as a picture framer and working with leading British Modernists such as Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Bryan Pearce and Kate Nicholson. This exposure to such influential painting and print became an informal education of sorts, inspiring her to her own career as an artist. In the early 1970s Lieke was elected as a Member of the Penwith Society of Arts, and in 1985 she was invited by Mary ‘Boots’ Redgrave to exhibit her work at the New Craftsman. Working from her studio in Penwith, Lieke creates semi-abstracted paintings and prints inspired by her early morning walks along the beautiful beaches and coastal and moorland paths of West Cornwall. Through simple compositions, textural marks and a distinctive, glowing palette, her works express the unique atmosphere of Cornwall’s radiant Atlantic coast, its shifting white sands and shimmering blue ocean.