9 - 27 March 2006
about the exhibition
Variations in the quality of light and colour under changing climatic conditions typify Judith White’s interpretations of the Australian landscape. Irrespective of the vantage point taken, her paintings are invested with an atmospheric visual energy, a movement of shape and form played out across the rich, tactile surface of the canvas. In her latest work, Judith has moved away from strategies such as aerial perspective and firm horizon lines into more meditative and abstract visions of landscape. The built up surfaces contain seemingly random linear mark-making and translucent pools of colour that bleed into each other, effectively concealing an unwavering structural coherence. Fellow artist, Euan Macleod, says “the title of this group of paintings, ‘Bush Creek’, seems to imply the artist on a riverbank looking into the watery depths, and as a viewer you seem to slip into the same meditative, contemplative state of dreamily experiencing the gentle flow of this inner world. Looking at the paintings, you too are moving – floating, suspended in this infinite environment, but then there also coexists a violence – the chaos that has caused this seemingly indiscriminate picking up and depositing of physical matter.”
Judith White was born in Sydney and trained at the National Art School as well as receiving a Bachelor of Arts Degree at New England and Sydney Universities. She has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas including many successful solo shows. Judith has been awarded many prizes during her career, and her work was shown in the Wynne Prize in 1999. She was commissioned by the Sydney Olympics 2000 Organisers for a major public work and, in 2004, won the Fleurieu Peninsula McLaren Vale Prize in South Australia’s wine region. She is represented in many corporate collections throughout Australia, Japan, Holland, Israel, Indonesia and New Zealand. This is Judith’s sixth exhibition with Beaver Galleries.
