Judith B. Anderson

Judith Anderson has been a high school English teacher, a television journalist (even a news anchor, for a short period of time), and an attorney. Her first love has always been art, however, and 2001 she retired from law practice to devote more time to painting.

Judith is almost entirely self-taught (her formal education was academic, not art-oriented), although she has taken numerous courses at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Hand Workshop (now the Visual Arts Center) in Richmond, Virginia, as well as spent numerous lovely summer weeks at Nimrod Hall Art Camp in Bath County, Virginia.

In Richmond, she has been an active member of Artspace and was one of the key persons behind its move to the present location in Plant Zero. She was president of Artspace for twoyears, then served as chair of the Exhibition Committee, spearheading the first very successful radius250 show, which has become a bi-annual event.

In recent years her oil paintings have followed two strains: those painted on site from life and those inspired by trains (see images at left). In the past, she also drew inspiration from vintage photos (see website), and is currently working on paintings that will combine the train-based work and vintage photos. What evolves remains to be seen! She is represented, from time to time here in Richmond, by Astra Design, and by the Gail Pierson Gallery in Cape May, New Jersey, where she held her fourth annual solo show this July (2012). Anderson anticipates a show of her train-inspired paintings and photographs in Lexington in April 2013 at Studio Eleven, her second show in that location.

Anderson continues to be fascinated by the geometry and surfaces of trains, particularly old trains that have aged enough to have multiple layers of paint and rust on their surfaces. "There is something incredibly beautiful and fascinating to me about the layers of paint, applied by humans, and layers of rust, caused by nature -- corrosion and erosion. Mingled together, as they are on so many train surfaces, they are seductively compelling as pure abstraction, with the added of enticement of being very real objects." This fascination has played itself out in both her paintings and photographs.