Earth’s Symphony: Paintings by Rita Blitt
Blitt’s most recent works connect with the natural world through line, movement, and color. On view at the Leedy Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri, through February 27.
Earth’s Symphony, on view at the Leedy Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri, through February 27, represents a pivotal moment in Rita Blitt’s decades-long dedication to exploring the expressive qualities of line, movement, and color. Her most recent paintings, created during the past three years, reflect Blitt’s deepening connection with the natural world around her, building on core themes within her practice while reaching new levels of intimacy and nuance. Central to her approach is the conviction that line possesses an animating energy — each brushstroke, drawn gesture, or fusion of color embodies a sense of momentum and fluidity, as if capturing the choreography of nature itself.
Throughout the decades, Blitt has consistently drawn inspiration from nature, family, music, and movement, aiming to transform the everyday beauty of neighborhood gardens and trees into expansive contemplations on growth, renewal, and the cyclical nature of life. Through painting, she turns fleeting glimpses of the everyday into meditations on the universal, hoping to remind viewers of nature’s endless potential for artistic transformation. Blitt’s signature style, where movement and color form a contrapuntal interdependence, intends for the local to become universal and the transient to become enduring.
“Thinking of Trees IV” (2025) encapsulates these ideas. In this painting, Blitt’s commitment as a colorist is evident: radiant hues envelop energetic lines, echoing her landscapes of the 1960s and the luminous “Ovals” of the 1980s. “Thinking of Trees IV” demonstrates how she infuses color to create atmosphere, layering tones to evoke the shifting light and changing seasons. Sinuous lines suggest tree branches swaying in the breeze, their energy extending beyond the canvas. A visual symphony, harmonies of line and color resonate with the emotional and sensory registers of the natural world, reaffirming Blitt’s effort to translate the essence of nature into vibrant visual music.
Find more information on the exhibition at leedy-voulkos.com, and learn about the artist at ritablitt.com.
