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GLANTZMAN

Judy Glantzman sees the shades of life, and paints them. Has as long as I've had the pleasure of seeing her work, since she was a fourth year painter at RISD almost twenty years ago. In many ways these most recent paintings remind me of the work she was doing then. The intimacy. The nuance that goes hand in hand with the directness that is her nature. You see it when you meet her. A warmth. Something in her gentle but unswerving glance.
That's the thing. You can't really put a finger on it. What can I say? Judy Glantzman's paintings are about as figurative and abstract as you can get at the same time. A tradition built by the likes of Picasso, DeKooning, and Bacon, sure, but what else? The psychological portrait? The visceral manifestation of the internal experience, the being beneath the surface? Judy Glantzman peels back the skin and looks inside.


What she sees, the glass she looks through, has always been something of a mirror. Her people always seem to be glance men and women. Self- portraits. Yes, these paintings are generations of Judy Glantzman. She turns her high powered lens on herself, and within that world finds all the mystery, gesture, intensity, and emotion of a lifetime. The paintings can be funny, even impish, elf-like, mischievous. They can also be solemn, maternal, gracious in pain and sorrow. They echo both Madonnas, Renaissance and MTV: half proud milk flowing breasted matriarch; half ingenue, enfant-terrible.


And with what color and passion of paint they do what they do. Splats and scrapes and blobs to temper her deft brush. Dimensions of space, time, and experience like the Shades, she takes our hand and guides us underneath.

 

Catalog Essay by Addison Parks for a Solo Exhibit at Gallery 28, Boston, 1995


 

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