EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Judith Laws’ new exhibition EFFERVESCENCE, features a series of new, and past paintings and drawings showcasing her passion for expressive abstraction.

Intertwining the senses and memory, Judith uses blank pages and canvases as opportunities to experiment, and is as passionate about the process of working with paint as she is resolute with her brilliant pallette. For this new exhibition she has explored new mediums, including fluorescent acrylics and spray paint.

In this new collection, Judith’s adour for deep colour and contrast is layered with the drips of running paint and energetic oil stick and charcoal marks, as can be seen in Look Within. Here she has challenged her process by leaving more white space, and working with the marks and drips she would have previously chosen to overpaint.

Judith has been painting for more than 5 decades. Serendipitously enrolling in a traditional oil painting class when her youngest child (of five children) started kindergarten, Judith leapt in to the world of visual arts in the early 1970’s. Her travels in outback Australia, along with her mentorship from artists including Dr Irene Amos OAM (1927-2012), offered Judith a shfiting lens for observation – from the minutiae of markings on fallen leaves and bark, the vertosols of arid outback Queensland, to the tidal changes impacting local coastal landscapes.

While not enamoured of plein air painting, the ideas and colours of the Australian outback stayed with her. Back in the studio, a great surge of productivity lead to a striking series of dunes, deserts, and dried river beds, in her own expressive style. Judith has travelled extensively, throughout Australia and abroad, including the Mediterranian – Northern Africa, Greece and the Greek Islands, and has innummerable notebooks of studies and ideas that were later developed in the studio.