{"id":32889,"date":"2016-04-06T19:24:54","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T01:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=32889"},"modified":"2019-11-15T10:03:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T16:03:01","slug":"tom-judd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/tom-judd\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Judd"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tom<\/a>

Tom Judd, photo by Nicholas Kelsh<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cGo West, young man\u201d was the catchphrase for generations of young Americans, urged to throw themselves into the rush of America\u2019s Manifest Destiny. A century later, Tom Judd decided to go East, but the myth of the West was never left far behind, and this month the Salt Lake City \u201cexpatriate\u201d brings to Modern West Fine Art a new collection of work focusing on when (and how) the West was settled.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Fence Me In<\/em> is filled with a number of small, collage-based works, and some larger ones, too. While Judd works in both acrylic and oil (doing the backgrounds of his large paintings with acrylic, the foregrounds in oil), on his collage works (he has always incorporated a lot of collage) he uses only acrylic \u201cbecause I want to work fast. Those small pieces are dependent on my striking while the iron is hot \u2013 not going in and refining them. They are the lynchpin of the show. They are slightly subversive: out to deconstruct the [Hollywood] myth, to turn it on its head \u2013 the noble thing about our national character while we were wiping out the Indians. This manifest destiny shit; the whole macho Marlboro man stuff. I want them fresh.”<\/p>\n

Judd allows, however, that he loves the myth itself \u201cas long as it stays a myth and is not sold to us as the truth.<\/p>\n

Judd\u2019s roots in Utah are deep. He did not grow up in a Mormon household, but his great-grandfather was LDS Church President Heber J. Grant (who served for nearly 30 years), something that has always \u201cfascinated me and is very much part of my artwork and, indeed, my life,\u201d says the artist.<\/p>\n

Judd, 64, knew he was an artist at age 7 when his family moved him from the hillside of Mount Olympus to a suburb of Chicago for a year. \u201cIt was traumatic and I remember that my escape was obsessively drawing battleships. And I decided that my only option in surviving life was to be an artist.\u201d He says he always took the artwork seriously.<\/p>\n

Judd attended Olympus High where he started a folk group called the Louisville Burglars (he played the autoharp) and dated a girl for about six months who was a year behind him: the delightfully quirky local artist Susan Kirby who recently relocated to Mexico. They always have remained close friends.<\/p>\n

His childhood buddies included Phillips Gallery artist Mark Knudsen. Both ended up at The Salt Lake Tribune<\/em> when Judd was at the University of Utah in the early \u201870s, Knudsen in the art department. \u201cI was just a copy boy,\u201d Judd recalls. He is remembered to this day by longtime staffers for his role in starting a series of cartoons called \u201cThe East Side of Mexico,\u201d where donkeys stood around contemplating life in a deviant manner, as donkeys are wont to do. The entire newsroom made contributions.<\/p>\n

He left the U in 1973 to go to the Philadelphia College of Art. Upon graduation he knew two things: he didn\u2019t want to teach and he \u201cwanted to do his artwork and was going to make it work.\u201d<\/p>\n

He couldn\u2019t find a gallery to take his stuff and, three years out of school, Judd made an incredibly audacious move: he called the curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d\u2019Harnoncourt, cold, with no introduction (he thinks the gatekeepers thought he said Don Judd instead of Tom Judd), and talked her into looking at his portfolio, such as it was. (Daughter of MoMA director Rene d\u2019Harnoncourt, Anne would become \u2013 a female! — director and CEO of the Philadelphia MOA for 25 years.) Six months later, after a studio visit by some high muckety-mucks, Judd was not only included in a show but, at 25, had a piece purchased for the permanent collection of that prestigious museum.<\/p>\n

However, that didn\u2019t resolve day-to-day needs. So, first, he tended bar. Then, because he had always painted houses, he started his own house-painting company and did that for 15 years. \u201cIt really worked great in that I could design it and set it up and I\u2019d get the crew going and then go to the studio.\u201d He also sold a lot of art to his house-painting clients. By 1994, Judd was making half his earnings off his art sales and decided that if he put all the energy he was putting into the house-painting company into his own painting he could make it as a full-time artist. So he did.<\/p>\n

Now he has a huge studio where he works as a 9-to-5 artist. Well, actually he has breakfast, takes 9-year-old daughter Astrid to school, hits the studio by 8:20, makes a fire in the wood-burning stove in winter, and picks up his daughter at 2 or so, when his painting day comes to an end. Still, he says, that\u2019s a pretty good day of painting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He has shown frequently in Utah, though for the past 40 years he has been in Philadelphia. His wife, Kiki Gaffney, also an excellent artist, shows mostly in Philadelphia, but, like Judd, has had several exhibits at Park City\u2019s Julie Nester Gallery. Astrid is an artist, too, though she hasn\u2019t shown anywhere yet. Judd\u2019s son Will, 27, studied international business at Drexel University, about as far from the tree as one can fall. (This happens in the best of families, of course.)
\nJudd lives by words of Chuck Close: \u201cInspiration is for amateurs,\u201d adding that the quote continues: \u201cthe rest of us just need to show up and go to work.\u201d Which, for some reason, immediately reminds him of the oil on canvas he terms \u201cthe star of the show\u201d at Modern West: \u201c\u2019Mount Shasta\u2019 \u2013 6-foot square and the largest work there.\u201d<\/p>\n

He invariably works on a series, \u201cnever, ever\u201d on just one piece. \u201cIt\u2019s always an idea I go at by doing a lot of different things within an idea. I work on several different paintings, often in several different media, at once.\u201d
\nThe artist\u2019s early work reflects an interest in the billboards and other imagery along American highways back when he went on family vacations as a child. \u201cMan\u2019s Head\u201d (1985) has been included in two museum shows and is now in the permanent collection of the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. Another, from 1994, called \u201cThe Billboard Project\u201d (subtitled \u201cThe Lost Vacation\u201d), was in fact a 20\u2019 X 60\u2019 billboard installed on an interstate highway in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

By 1996, Judd was beginning to incorporate what he terms \u201crecycled imagery\u201d into his paintings: collaged found photos made their first appearance, mounted inside a series of found frames or, using pictures from his senior class yearbook, comprising the background of a piece called \u201cGraduation.\u201d He explains that \u201cthere is often the sense of things being painted over other things in a very haphazard way, again imitating the way billboards get painted over with little thought or intention . . . I wanted to capture that same essence of a chance association of images which brings about a sort of visual poetry.\u201d \u201cAttribute\u201d is one example.<\/p>\n

About this time, on a river-rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho, Judd found a hermit shack where a man named Sylvan \u201cBuckskin Bill\u201d Hart had lived for 40 years. His sleeping quarters had old wallpaper samples glued to the inside walls and the setup reminded Judd of exploring similar places as a kid in Utah and imagining who had lived there and what their lives were like. Along with some paintings, Hart\u2019s shack inspired Judd to create his own \u201cHermit House\u201d which was first exhibited in 2005 at the Stremmel Gallery in Reno and later displayed for six months at the Nevada Museum of Contemporary Art. It eventually was purchased for a corporate collection. Another installation piece, \u201cTijuana Weekend,\u201d included a shack similar to those Judd had seen people living in in that largely poverty-stricken Mexican border town.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe work from this period was a series of collages and fragmentations of surfaces and imagery,\u201d says Judd. \u201cIt speaks about memory and metaphor. I combined landscape, still life, patterns and figures in an effort to imitate the eclectic nature of our memories.\u201d He used wallpaper, old recipes, found photos, and ephemera in such works as \u201cPeach Pudding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Influences (or \u201cfellow travelers\u201d) are Walker Evans and Joseph Cornell. \u201c[\u201cVillage,\u201d for example,] suggests the finding of an artifact from another time . . . [imparting] a contradictory sense of loss and discovery on the viewer.\u201d<\/p>\n