Oil, acrylic and water color paintings based in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Katti Ritzenhoff discovered her passion for painting while on sabbatical from her full time teaching job at Central Connecticut State University. She is now combining her theoretical background in film and media studies as well as visual communication and television production with the creation of new work. Inspired by the French Fauve movement and German expressionist figures like Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, Ritzenhoff tries to explore using a palette with primary colors.

The most influential journeys led her in 2018 and 2019 to Namibia and Morocco in Southern and North Africa. Frequent trips to England while on Sabbatical also allowed her to discover the exhibits by Pierre Bonnard, Joaquin Sorolla and Vincent Van Gogh, on view in London. Research on Stanley Kubrick's films in the London Archives adds to the background of these explorations. 

The first of Ritzenhoff's painting projects was inspired by a co-edited publication about "The Handmaid's Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders" (with Janis L. Goldie, Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), a grim reminder that women's and civil rights are at stake in post-9/11 America. The representation of Margaret Atwood's "Offred," based on the image of actress Elisabeth Moss in the Hulu TV adaptation, is now used as the cover of the book.

In April 2020 Ritzenhoff exhibited oil and water color pictures from a recent trip to Colombia at Marty's Cafe in Washington Depot (in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic). 

In July 2022 a new exhibit on "Abstract Meditations" was shown at Marty's Cafe. 

Throughout the month of July 2023, Ritzenhoff exhibited at the Five Points Art Gallery Annex in Torrington, Connecticut in a joint show with fellow artists Julie Chang and Jennifer Boyd. 

(Photo credit, including homepage portrait: Dominick Daniels)