When did you first start painting?
I completed my first oil painting when I was about 10 years old. It was a little snow scene with a barn, trees and a brook. I was taking lessons from an artist in Wilton, Connecticut and I remember how I really loved the peacefulness of painting.
Who were your artistic influences?
I think the real excitement for what I could achieve, began when I took intensive drawing classes in [Staples] High School, which I enrolled in each semester for three years. The instructor, Dr. Jim Wheeler, taught drawing as a philosophy; a holistic approach to rendering a subject.
He made me look at drawing in a completely new way. He taught that “space creates shape” so that one would not draw a nose, for example, one would sketch the lights and darks within and around the subject all accurately related to each other, and then would emerge a “nose”. He taught us not to break down and isolate the subject, but rather to render the lights and darks and spaces throughout, always working all over the page, on an entire piece at once. It was very exciting to work in this way, simply, yet accurately relating lights and darks and space, but then stepping back at the end and seeing that your subject had emerged in a spontaneously alive way.
In high school, I also worked part time in an art gallery in Westport and would occasionally meet artists who would drop in. I remember asking an artist (the amazing Westport artist, Alberta Cifollelli) to show me what she saw in a good painting. She framed a random 2″x2″ square with her fingers on a mural size painting and said that every piece of a painting should be this alive and vivid. I always remember that.
In around 2007, I also took a few painting classes with the beautiful Westport artist Arlene Skutch, of the “Pink House Painters”. She was a thoughtful, intuitive artist and teacher.
How would you classify your art?
I find it difficult to “classify” my art, but I can say this: the artists I most admire were from the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries and are my biggest influences. I see them doing with paint, that which had most excited me in Dr. Wheelers charcoal drawing class. It is the illusion of a kind of free randomness in paint application from which the subject emerges. Painting with a disciplined freedom.
Is there an artist you especially admire?
I absolutely love and admire the work of John Singer Sargent. His work is just amazing to me. He was known primarily as a portrait painter and his portrait work was beautiful, but his landscapes are what really astound me. He was just a master of color, light effects and paint application often painting “sketches” and landscapes loosely on location. Every stroke looks so intense, so rich and completely purposeful.
On the more abstract side of art, which I am exploring more and more, I saw the Hilma af Klint exhibit at the Guggenheim in March 2019 and it was mind blowing.
Judy Auber Jahnel was interviewed in 2020 by Anastacia Jahnel
