JUDY MARSHALL is a self-taught artist, who came to painting out of a background of psychology and emotional healing. Her experience as a therapist for many years is apparent in her artwork, which also reflects the subjective side of a lifelong journey towards understanding the unconscious and personal symbol.
AN ABSTRACT expressionist style best describes my traditional oil painting on canvas, masonite, paper, and glass. In exploring the emotional response to color and the forms that arise out of the application of successive layers of paint, each work feels more like a discovery than a creation. It is as though a visually intuitive process guides the uncovering of an elemental underlying reality.
DIGITAL TOOLS are another form of paint (with mouse as brush and pixels as pigment). I initially worked with the simplest aspects of Clarisworks and Adobe Photoshop in an attempt to translate my traditional abstract expressionist themes into digital media. The trade-off between the real depth and texture, created by layers of paint, was another type of illusory depth. I explored the ability to go into an image, manipulating only a part of it, while creating simultaneous variations and changeable layers.
THE DIGITAL IMAGES directly translate abstraction from paint to digital media. Color is applied like broad strokes on canvas - evocative and elemental -- suggesting mood and movement. The color creates a tangible, often sensual and emotional dynamic all its own, varying in tone from dark to buoyant.
MANY OF MY IMAGES were created by delving so deeply into the pixels that an actual (not suggested) elemental reality is revealed. These images appear either photographic (although no photographs were actually used) or painterly depictions of an alternative, but strangely recognizable dream world, in which the figures seem identifiable, even animate - part humanoid, part space creature, part surreal fantasy. In the Flower Series, for example, the vibrant and evanescent qualities project the illusion of living blossoms caught in time, amidst the flora and fauna of an internal alien landscape.
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