About the Artist

For 24 years Judith Graham has lived in and painted the geological features which dominate Southwestern Colorado, especially the shapes and colors of the Rio Grande River drainage and the San Juan Mountains. Her paintings communicate a deep connection with place and how one exists and moves about in wild places, particularly those on the tundra, above timberline. Sensed in her paintings is the relationship between notions of connectedness and place, (as espoused by Lucy Lippard and Yi-Fu Tuan and embodied in “genius loci”). The visual detail of place can metaphorically suggest something other than itself. A place or the representation thereof can be a veil over what we yearn to understand, a portal. Her paintings are about the vastness, purity and beauty of remote places and are meant to be uplifting. She has spent a lifetime in pursuit of the most genuine distillation of ideas as they can be expressed in the visual language of color and shape with paint on canvas. Judith Graham attended the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in New York, but received her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago because the broader intellectual and cultural context of visual ideas was important to her. Judith Graham has had one-person exhibitions in the United States and has created site-specific commissions of up to 30’in various cities.

Professional Highlights

  • MFA-University of Chicago
  • School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in New York
  • One person shows in Chicago, Colorado, Wisconsin & California
  • Private collections in California, Colorado, Illinois, Arizona, Ohio, Florida & Minnesota
  • Teaching Experience, All Ages
  • Complete Curriculum Vitae (CV) available for download.

Press

Links and Resources

A Sense of Place

Geological Places

Acknowledgement of Influences

Acknowledging Vera

I would like to especially acknowledge Vera Klement, the greatest living painter in my opinion, and express my deepest gratitude for all that she has given me, one of her students at the University of Chicago.  Her role as my major professor and mentor has been profoundly and integrally important to me and I could never thank her enough.

Judith Graham, 2015