Work of the week – Kay Ritter, MAGNUM OPUS

Did you think squirrels spend all their creative energy trying to figure out how to raid bird feeders? With “Magnum Opus,” Rhode Island artist Kay Ritter imagines quite otherwise. But her idea for the painting didn’t start with the squirrel. “I guess I got it when I saw these beautiful big acorns every day when I was walking the dog,” she says. “The wheels started turning: What can I do with those?” Kay painted the sculpture from life — first forming a pyramid from Plasticine and pushing acorns into the soft clay. Three-quarters of the way through painting it, a mouse got into her studio and stole one of the acorns, but that was easily replaced.

“The more I worked on the painting, the more I realized it was autobiographical,” Kay says. “The squirrel is an artist, and he’s standing there with his creation — how I sometimes feel at an opening. Here I am. Here’s the work. What do you think?” She says she added the oak leaf only because she thought the painting “needed a little je ne sais quoi.”  But when we mentioned we’d envisioned the leaf as a kind of prize ribbon, she said she liked that idea. “That’s one of my goals — to bring viewers into the picture and imagine what’s going on,” she added.

The artist’s property is visible through the trees, including the carriage house she uses as her studio. After 20 years of making more than 500 humorous figurative constructions, Kay felt the need to do something different. So she turned to traditional still lifes in oils, basically teaching herself to paint. Eventually, “I started to feel like I could step off the plank and start to invent something and have it be believable,” she says.  See more of Kay Ritter’s work