Judith Austen photo by Susan Lapides

Artist's Statement: Judith Austen, 2010

Color is my starting point, and what brings me to a canvas is a visual moment I want to grab and get down as mine: always in oil paint.

I work the foreground and background simultaneously, treating the background with equal weight so that the subject is merged and ultimately transformed. In the last year, I moved from my home studio into a commercial space in order to paint full time. In this transition, I found myself painting less on location and photographing more - specifically large bodies of water. Enlarged and deliberately distorted, my photographic images have become departure points from which to paint a new body of work: naked winter trees captured in a frozen river; spring swamp irises bordering a pond; summer marsh reeds in shallow water. No matter where the location or starting point, nowhere is so vivid as what holds in paint.