ARTIST STATEMENT

Painting allows me to slow down and pay attention.

I am drawn to subjects that reveal themselves gradually: reflections moving across water, a potted cactus catching late afternoon light, a familiar house transformed by weather or season. What begins as observation often becomes something more personal: a record of atmosphere, memory, and emotional presence.

My work is less concerned with documenting a place than with translating how it feels to inhabit it. Through painting, ordinary subjects become opportunities to explore resilience, beauty, impermanence, and our relationship to the environments we call home.

The longer I paint, the more I believe attention itself is an act of reverence.

Selected exhibitions, education, awards, publications, press, and professional experience.

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EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

PRESS & FEATURES

Painting Ideas
The Desert Leaf, November 2019
By Beth Surdut

A profile of Judith Austen and the ideas, observations, and experiences that shape her painting practice.

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AUTHOR

Judith Austen is also the author of Sulamith’s Daughter, a memoir exploring family history, memory, survival, and inherited experience.

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PUBLICATIONS

A digital exhibition catalogue exploring Judith Austen's ongoing series of cactus portraits and desert still life.

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SELECTED SERIES

Desert Contained
The desert landscape is vast and overwhelming. To bring it into a more intimate scale, I planted cacti in pots, treated them like pets, and painted them as portraits. 
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Water Close-Up / Seascapes
Open water can be nature's inviting mirror of tranquility, a sanctuary to linger by, or it can turn to a treacherous turbulence, terrifying and real. I am the shorebird poised for the visual moment I want to grab and get down as mine, always in oil paint. During the transition from my home studio to a commercial space, I found myself painting on location at the water's edge and also taking photographs so as to finish some paintings in the studio. These photos, enlarged and deliberately distorted, serve as departure points for new paintings within the ongoing series, Water Close-up

When I moved to New England, where I lived much of my adult life, I spent my summers painting water from the shore. Most of these took place over many sessions, the wind howling around me, tide coming and going, and the comfort of lobstermen’s voices carrying over to where I perched. The light and tide could change so fast that some paintings had to be finished in one sitting. Even if I photographed the scene, when I got back to my studio, the painting had a sense of presence totally other than a camera's blink.
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House Paintings
I fall in love with houses. I don't want to own them; I want to get them down on canvas exactly as I feel them to be. I march up to the front door, ring the bell, and ask permission to perch on the property until I quench my passion. Rarely does the owner want to buy the painting. “You didn't paint the one tree I planted myself.” Or “The flower bed you forgot is the only thing that wasn't here before I came.“ No one “owns” a house. We are all temporary occupants just passing through; however, I’ve got my version down on canvas.
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Surrealism
I am a big nightdreamer. Many of my ideas come in my sleep, albeit some of them more comforting than others. When I get an idea and move it onto canvas, once I hit a certain “tipsiness” in the painting, I get a giddy feeling of satisfaction. Anthropomorphism is as comforting to me as my native tongue, so inanimate objects as alive is no different than playing with dolls, building sand castles, or flying in my dreams.
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Abstract Works
Abstracts are about ideas dreamt into color. A series can begin with an idea as academic as Primary Colors and then allow me to go where it takes me on canvas. Or it can be about a color I need in the same way as a food I may crave. This can take the form of paint or knitting, the latter enabling me to physically hold and feel the color. In facing the death of my parents, painting as I felt them allowed me the transition on my own terms, leading to an acceptance with heart. How a viewer may experience an abstract can be as personal and self-referential as the artist who painted it. 
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Desert Plein Air
Plein air painting is being in the moment. A cloud can cover a mountain and shadow a cactus. The sun may set a mountain on fire or bake the paint on the canvas. The intensity of being “out there” is a loss of self and becoming one with the present.
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Landscapes
Works combining materials and processes across periods of experimentation.
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Mixed Media
Like all pack rat art-makers, I lovingly collect odd things such as fabrics, papers, foils, strings, ribbons, and yarns, that might one day serve as collage material. This is true of certain paintings too. What may have started out an idea for a painting on canvas could be enhanced by the contrast of textures and forms created by collage. It is playful, no rules, and great fun
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Aging
When I turned sixty, an age I felt okay about, nothing I dreaded, until I entered my local hospital for a routine mammogram.  For the first time ever, I heard myself say, "Well, Judith, this is the place where you will probably die." The test results were fine, nothing wrong, everything normal.  However, the acknowledgment that my life was two-thirds lived and I was living on the last one-third edge, stirred me. The paintings in this series are about aging, the feelings encountered while living my life when others are still living the first two-thirds of theirs.
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