Judith Kramer in her home studio. photo: Bill Drawbaugh
Painter Judith Kramer characterizes herself as an "active senior," but active is too tame an adjective to describe this petite, twinkly-eyed, 76-year-old dynamo. A working artist for decades, she only took up painting on canvas as recently as a few years ago. She spent most of her professional life in public relations, but expressed her creativity with needlework and quilting, drawn to the geometric patterns inherent in those crafts and her youthful passion for architecture, which led her to study interior design at the Art Institute of Chicago.
A dream led her to the inception of her current style she was painting quilt designs on recycled furniture. Upon waking, she acted upon her idea and soon was selling "repurposed found furniture" to galleries and furniture stores in the Chicago area. Buoyed by success, she quit her job three months before the 1981 recession and endured a period of insecurity that involved surviving with freelance writing, public relations work and various temporary situations, all the while painting furniture, then adding floor cloths and wall hangings to her repertoire.
Judith's life also included raising three sons who are successful professional designers and painters. She is working on a novel based on her mother's life, and her own story is a study in independence, survival, creativity, adaptability and the uses of intelligence and indomitability in the face of many adverse financial, health-related and personal circumstances.
Her creative output eventually morphed from textiles, furniture and wall hangings to paintings on stretched canvas, in a style that she calls "Architectural Landscape." These paintings, mostly abstract, geometrical, highly patterned, are executed precisely in tints reminiscent of vegetal dye Navajo rugs, Burntwater, Chinle or Wide Ruins, for instance. She favors cool tans, yellows and browns, pale blues and greens, with exactitude of edge and meticulous attention to detail, even in seeming simplicity. A sense of quiet and calm is important, as her artist's statement explains: "Expressing stillness, while not eliminating its sense of energy, is a way for me to bring some degree of sanity to the frantic world of multitasking and violence in which we find ourselves living."
Observing the neatly organized supplies and rulers arranged on her work table and the tidy and cheerful living room with carefully positioned art, examples of her whimsical painted furniture, rugs and other textiles, it's apparent that she's comfortable with order and organization, in control of her output and destiny, evolving, and happy to do so, even late in life. That her epiphany, described as the style change from mostly architectural to mostly abstract and semi-abstract, came only a few months ago is testament to her resilience and flexibility.
Her solo show, entitled "Contemporary Architectural Landscape Explorations: A Journey from Semi-representational to Abstract Paintings," at the Tucson International Airport's Lower Links Gallery, (7005 S. Plumer Ave.), opening June 14 and running through August 6, is her first one-person exhibit.
She's been included in several local group shows and participated in the 2010 Open Studios Tour, in the Tucson Museum of Art's Artisan's Market and in New York City in 2009, at The Chelsea International Fine Art Competition at Agora Gallery.
View her work online at www.flickr.com/photos/judithkramerartist.
