Judith Shapiro - Artist's Statement

Art transcends the commonplace into a cultural icon.

A sensibility to mediate between the mundane and the inspired is manifested in the intentional creation of an aesthetic object. 

Art is the outcome of the psychic response to sense-perception, which artists shape by material means to communicate their inner experience of transforming mental images into tangible form.

Abstract painting is my chosen medium of communication.

It enables me to explore the visual emergence of a complex relationship among color, form, surface and scale.

Those painted relationships may provide the viewer an insight into my inner world. 

In some of my paintings, irregular shapes are chosen as a means of escaping the limitations imposed on creativity by the conventional rectangular format.  These works in particular are intended as sculpture, the wall serves as a complement to the composition in the same way a sculpture relates to its surrounding 'negative' space.

All my artworks are engaged with the topography of surface, i.e. texture.  Each canvas is coated with multiple layers of paint, of different colors & thickness.  Occasionally, strips of wood or string are introduced. 

Eventually, these strata of matter cause the canvas to assume the characteristics of a place on the earth.  As with the discovery of many terrestrial locations, there is then quandary: to build up or dig in?  Both options are available, but often excavation is the more inviting. There is an archaeological impulse.

But rather than dig to expose the mysteries of some ancient civilization, the topography of the work is excavated to expose the hidden color tones, textures and forms that surface from beneath.

This process has a mystical quality due to the surprise effect of satisfying the curiosity how the 'buried' layers will relate to the outer, visible top layer of the work....

It establishes an intimate locus, a meeting place where the art and the artist live.