Betsy Ruth Byers is a visual artist living, working and teaching in St. Peter, Minnesota.
Betsy Ruth Byers holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is currently Chair and Associate Professor of fine arts at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her work has been exhibited at the National Galleries of Scotland, SCOPE International Art Fair, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, DeVos Art Museum, Hillstrom Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, and the Torpedo Factory. Her work resides in several private, corporate and museum collections including the Weisman Museum of Art, Hillstrom Museum of Art, Target Corporation, Nordstrom Corporation, BMO Harris Bank, Minnesota Vikings LLC, LPM Corporation, and Allina Health Center.
When Betsy is not teaching or in the studio she enjoys spending time with her husband, Matt, son, Augustus and daughter, Gretel hiking, camping, and road tripping.
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“Painting requires a delicate balance between observation and action. For me, it is a meditation on the complicated relationship between our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit.”
Artist Statement
I paint to discover and imagine our intimate relationship with the environment in an abstract form. My paintings are an intersection of memory and process. The work births from potent encounters with the natural world, anchored in the relationship between perception, landscape and cultural consciousness.
My work seeks to capture an embodied awareness and connectedness to materiality, light and pressure that we all possess, but at times fail to recognize amidst the background noise. Responding to the corporeal activity of laying paint on canvas, I activate its abilities by scraping, expanding, mixing, and overlapping layers. Interweaving the psychological space and materiality of paint, I search for reciprocity between the boundaries of real and imagined; subjective and objective; intimacy and immensity; self and other.