Judith Lodge

Judith Lodge (born July 25, 1941) is an American Canadian painter and photographer who often explores how the two mediums play off of and inform one another. Her abstract portraits of memories, situations, events, and people are inspired by the unconscious, dreams, journals, and nature. She has worked in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Banff, Minnesota, and New York, where she has lived for more than thirty years.
Background
Lodge was one of four daughters born to Jean Lodge in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her father, James, was a chemist at 3M who enjoyed throwing pots in his free time and built a tiny studio in the basement of their home. From as early as the fourth grade, she would bring a large pad of paper to class and tell people, "You make a mark, I’ll make a drawing from it." She completed a Bachelor of Science at Macalester College in St. Paul (1963). She received a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (1965), where she was the only woman in a class of 12. In the summer following her MFA graduation, Lodge made numerous trips to New York City, where she attended large Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon retrospectives. These exhibitions were greatly influential on Lodge as they exposed her to approaches in art practice which were not being taken up by the Cranbrook school at that time.
Artistic career
In 1972, Lodge moved to Vancouver, where she would spend the next decade, and began to work less figuratively than in earlier years. In Vancouver, she was friends with many women who were active in the women’s movement. She had her first entirely non-figurative solo exhibition in 1977 at the Surrey Art Gallery. At some point, Lodge expected to return to figurative work but became preoccupied by the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the abstract format. Her inspiration from nature is greatly credited to time spent on an island off the coast of Vancouver, which was partly owned by a friend. Here, she explored landscapes and notions of water. Although Lodge returned to the United States in 1980, moving to New York after finding Vancouver a discouraging place for artists, she continually aims to recreate the feeling of nature in British Columbia. Lodge notes how dreams and unconsciousness bring things to one’s attention, and claims she began making painted mandalas out of nowhere before finding out she had cancer. Following her diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, Lodge became attracted to photographing trees which had been struck by fire yet were still alive, stating that she felt akin to them. These damaged arbutus trees can be seen in the series Trees Hit by Lightening and Other Fires.
Style
Lodge’s monumental abstract works, sometimes as large as 10’x16’, partially derive from 1950s abstract expressionism. She typically utilizes a painterly style where thick layers and ropes of acrylic paint are built up in an almost three-dimensional topography, reminiscent of veins or sinews upon the surface of skin. The texture is built up in three or four steps and certain areas may be reworked in the process. Lodge often uses metallic gold, significantly in works from the "Life Jackets" and "Walls of Eden" exhibitions, symbolic of incorruptibility and sacredness, and confronting its audience rather than receding. She also tends to employ a strong sense of grid organization, as seen in the enormous works from "Walls of Eden."
Themes
"As a kid in a museum it looks like there is everything to talk about and paint, but it turns out that there are really only a few things. The seductive part about being a painter, I find, is that life is not a candy jar but rather there are a few central issues toward which one directs one’s life. I can remember being in high school when I first saw a reproduction of the Gauguin, […] Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going… well, there it was—profound philosophic content painted and then restated in words right on the canvas in the most direct and flatfooted war. I was astounded. Certainly, the notion that there are major primal subjects to be dealt with in the subconscious, in myth, in dreams, etc. is part of my painting heritage" - Judith Lodge Lodge’s paintings demonstrate how the boundary between conscious and unconscious can be a permeable membrane. Along with the world of nature and recalling images from life and the unconscious, other topics Lodge addresses in her work include, concerns with intersecting and overlapping areas of change; the eternal and the intangible; documentation of life energies, of what is seen, felt, and remembered; the notion of beauty as not fixed; and beauty tinged with terror and decomposition.
Professional activity
1969-1972 - Instructor: Painting and Drawing, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York
1969- Instructor: Painting and Drawing, Vancouver School of Art Summer School
1970-1971 - Instructor: Painting and Drawing, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York
1972-1977 - Instructor: Painting and Drawing, Banff School of Fine Arts, Banff, Alberta
1975-1976 - Visiting Artist: Banff School of Fine Arts, Banff, Alberta (to 1980), Visiting Artist: Minneapolis School of Art, Visiting Artist: Macalester College, Visiting Artist: University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia
1976-1977 - Instructor: Painting and Drawing, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Instructor: Painting and Drawing, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia
Assistant Professor: Painting and Drawing, College of St. Rose, Albany, New York
Instructor, Lecturer, Visiting Artist: Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia
Visiting Artist: York University, Toronto, Ontario
1993–2006 - Associate Chair: Illustration, Parsons School of Design, New York
Exhibitions
1971 - Hathorn Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York
1972 - Wheelock College, Boston, Massachusetts
1973 - Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
1974 - Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
1975 - Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
1977 - Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, British Columbia
1977 - "Walls of Eden" - Pender Street Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
1977 - "From This Point of View" (Group Show), Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
1978 - "Targets" - Victoria Art Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia
1978 - "Fire, Smoke, Water, Ice" - Art Core, Vancouver, British Columbia
1979 - "Rites of Passage" - Art Core, Vancouver, British Columbia
1984 - "Recent Drawings and Paintings" - Peter Whyte Gallery, Banff, Alberta
1986 - "Life Jackets" - University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia
Grants/awards
Canada Council Grant
Collections
Canada Council Art Bank
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
National Gallery of Canada
Vancouver City Collection
British Columbia Provincial Collection
Private Collections in New York City
Citibank Collection
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
References
Further reading
"This Gathering," Jane Rule, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Autumn 1976.
"Eve at the Walls." Jane Rule, Vanguard, March 1977.
"Eden Walls." David McWilliam, Criteria, November 1978.
"Recent Drawings." Capilano Review, No. 12, 1977.
YVR—Vancouver in Review, No. 2, March 1978.
External links
National Gallery of Canada
Works in the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
The Capilano Review
UBC Medicine
20th-century American photographers
20th-century Canadian photographers
Artists from New York (state)
Academic staff of the University of British Columbia
Artists from Saint Paul, Minnesota
1941 births
Living people
Canadian women photographers
American women photographers
21st-century American photographers
21st-century Canadian photographers
20th-century American women artists
American women academics
21st-century American women artists
20th-century Canadian women artists
21st-century Canadian women artists