Artist's Statement for this Exhibition

This work is about the look and feel of the mountains and the objects related to being in the mountains – pyramidal shapes, areas of blue, horses, mules and dogs, the elk, maps and tarps, etc.  How the mountains, skies and these other things look is important.  That these images are of very specific places which are pinpointed on the maps, makes it clear that specificity of place is of utmost importance.  Of more significance is that the landscape itself and paintings thereof can suggest what lies beyond.  In a compressed and metaphorical form, whether it is the land or a land substitute (a painting), we can get an idea, a glimpse of something beyond ourselves and our lives here.  The detail of  place and thing holds the purpose of suggesting something other than itself.  How or when the local implies the universal is interesting to us.  A place or a thing can be a veil over what we yearn to understand, a portal.  The science of place and thing is, in itself, mysteriously wondrous but the essence is infinite.

Judy Graham
Silverton, Colorado
2008