Hand Made by Judy
This past weekend I was in Florida visiting family.
After my mom died, I got the idea to curate an exhibit of her artwork, ideally to be shown at a museum. If I want that to happen, then the first step is to actually find all her work and take photos of it, so that’s what I spent Independence Day doing.
The exhibit is likely months to years away from realization, so in the interim, I present to you Hand Made by Judy, a virtual retrospective of my mom’s art.
My mom’s art career started in high school but really took off in college. She always liked to work in a variety of mediums, and here you see some examples of her trying out different materials and styles in the early 70s.
She had a penchant for mixed media, combining print making, paints, and colored pencils to explore the possibilities of shape and color. Looking at these, I get the sense she was experimenting, honing her technique and discovering what she liked.
During her MFA she specialized in weaving and produced a number of unique wall hangings in the late 70s and early 80s. The last of her weavings, featured here, is made of lint from all the laundry she had to do as a new mom.
She had limited time to work on her art in the 80s as a stay at home mom with one, two, three, and then four little ones, but she managed to produce some sketches and watercolors, as well as her first large oil paintings. Bird is my favorite of all her paintings, but Tractor has a charisma that can only be felt in person. It captures something essential about her upbringing in rural Illinois.
In the late 80s, my mom produced a series of large flower paintings that brought her some commercial success. It’s hard to explain in words how impressive these are in person, as they are four to five feet across and easily fill a wall when hung. I sadly can’t share pictures of all of them because many were sold at art shows, but here is a collection of the ones we still possess.
She eventually tired of oil painting and shifted to colored pencils. She produced a number of pieces in the 90s during her time teaching middle and high school, where she often worked alongside her students who were learning to use the same medium. Never satisfied to merely draw, she experimented with saturation to create contrast, as in the striking Underwear and in the overlapping bubbles of Fish and Turtles
In the bottom right you see a drawing she made from an underwater photo of one of my sisters. My mom used this as a guide to produce her last major work, Swimmer, in a return to large-format painting. Here, she is at the height of her craft, combining color and texture to create a stunning perspective on a young girl finding joy in learning to swim.
The last two images are not artworks per se, but I’ve included them for the messages they convey. On the left we see a splatter pad that one or more of us kids painted on, likely while my mom was painting. I found it wedged between two of the large paintings, keeping them separated so they wouldn’t stick.
On the right we have a pack of two blank canvases, still wrapped in plastic, waiting for her next work that never came. Sadly, my mom was often her own harshest critic, and many of her best pieces, like Bird and Tractor, remained hidden in storage for years because she worried they lacked sufficient artistic merit.
My mom was always a little unsure about her art. Unsure if it belonged. Unsure if it was good enough. It didn’t matter how often she heard that her art was good—a single, slightly critical comment could convince her that it was all trash.
Thankfully, she kept making art for many years, and though she was under appreciated in her lifetime, I hope that now her art can receive more of the attention it deserves.
Thanks for letting me share it with you.