Boo Ritson has an peculiar way of making her works where she involves models into the creation process of her paintings and applies materials right on their skin and clothes and take photographs of the end result. Such interactive process generates more life and character into her art works. Each work has its own narrative, chosen by the artist and usually involves motifs of American life and culture: diners, gas stations, American fast food such as doughnuts and hot dogs. Those elements echo road trips around America that artist is fascinated by.
Boo Ritson takes photographs of her models before the paint dries which creates the shiny glossy effect as well as gives artist little time for radical decisions that she often undertakes. In doing so, artist challenges herself and the process of creating each piece becomes a little game where the more decisions she takes to bring the work to life before the paint dries, the better. Each work takes from half-an-hour or over an hour.
Artists prefers to paint people that she knows and have worked with before as her creative process requires knowledge of physical bone structure and in what way paint will be applied. Therefore each creative process provides the artist with a ‘learning curve’.
Choosing the colour is essential to Ritson’s work and her predilection for bright colours is obvious, however recently artist became fascinated with applying white to certain parts of her models to give it the ‘unfinished’ effect. This gives her portraits a sculptural look and echoes marble statues.

text by Anny Baranova