The Gallery

For over twenty years, since the late 1990s in Australia, arriving in Bora Bora in 2003 and painting here ever since, Rydge Studio Bora Bora’s roots trace back to a life lived in the abstract expressionist tradition. Creativity runs in the family; my mother and my paternal grandfather were both artists, my grandfather trained under the Meldrum School of Tonalism and counted the acclaimed Australian artist Lloyd Rees among his close friends, and that eye was later formalized with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Art History, from the Australian National University.

There’s real beauty in the seascapes and mountainscapes that visitors carry home from Bora Bora, the postcard moment, the celebration, the bucket-list memory. That’s simply not the path Rydge Studio Bora Bora has chosen. What draws this work to abstraction is what it leaves open: each canvas is meant to hold color, gesture, and feeling that challenges the viewer to bring their own imagination and creativity to it, so that two people can stand in front of the same piece and walk away with two entirely different stories. As Piet Mondrian put it, “abstract art is not the creation of another reality, but the true vision of reality.” That’s abstraction: closer to something true than realism ever gets.

Clients arrive from every corner of the world, and taste varies as widely as the cultures they come from. Abstraction has a way of meeting all of them; without a fixed subject to agree or disagree with, each visitor finds the piece that speaks to their own eye.

Working mainly in oils on canvas, with acrylic pieces in the mix, Rydge Studio Bora Bora’s gallery brings together original work built across two decades and two very different corners of the world, available to view, and available to take home.