Join visual artist Barb Rydz Ross for “Inside the Artist’s Studio,” where she will take a closer look at abstract art and what needs to happen to declare a piece finished.

Ross creates her vibrant acrylics “abstractly, intuitively, with an overpowering need for balance and connection.” Her content is not literal but emotional, composed of color, texture and light. By using vivid color, layering with altered papers, creating shapes, then connecting forms with lines, spikes or dots, she expresses the importance of human relationship. By penetrating, stabbing or touching shapes she makes an attempt to relate, to affect, to establish communication, to link together. This need emerges from her solitary life in her studio and the observation that we are losing our ability to relate to each other face to face because our predominant communication is now conducted online.”

Barb has a BA degree in Fine Arts from the City College of New York. She recently completed the drawing certification program at the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), having already received a painting certificate from SAIC in 2012. She has studied with many artists in workshops across the U.S. and has taken painting classes at Harper College in Palatine, IL. and takes occasional workshops at Lill Street Art Center in Chicago.