Judy Howard works in soft pastels and watercolor and specializes in landscape painting. Her pastel paintings portray scenes around northwest Arkansas and the Hudson Valley in New York, scenes that she likes to call the quiet places — a field along an old highway, the edge of a pond, an old gravel road, a small creek — scenes that people drive by and don’t notice much. She is attracted to the way light hits objects and textures in those simple scenes, evoking emotional responses, moods, and memories.
Howard, a native of Fort Smith, Ark., received a B.A. in Art Education and taught junior high art briefly before opening a home studio, where she taught art classes for several years. She also taught drawing and watercolor classes for adults and children in the continuing education program at Westark College, now University of Arkansas-Fort Smith and then worked as a designer in their publications department before moving to Fayetteville, Ark., in 1998. She was a graphic designer and project manager for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture for 18 years, designing publications of all types and displays for both the Division and Bumpers College.
In 2018, she and her husband moved to the Kingston, N.Y., area where she currently works in her home art studio. She is a member of the Pastel Society of America, Ozark Pastel Society, Wallkill River Center for the Arts, and the Lower Hudson Valley Plein Air Painters.
Howard participated in numerous shows in Arkansas through the years, winning awards for both watercolor and pastel paintings. Some of her awards for pastel paintings include Best of Drawing/Pastel in the Artists of Northwest Arkansas’ 23rd Annual Regional Art Exhibition 2017; First Place in the Heart of America Artists Association’s Illinois River Salon 2016; Best of Show and 2nd Place in Miniatures in the Ozark Pastel Society Open Art Exhibition 2015; Best of Show and 1st Place in both the Landscape and Abstract categories in the Ozark Pastel Society Open Art Exhibition 2014; Best of Show in the 18th Annual ANA Regional Exhibition at the Arts Center of the Ozarks in August 2012.
She has also had paintings juried into international pastel shows such as the the 37th International Association of Pastel Societies (IAPS) Web Show 2020; the 2019 and 2020 Pastel Society of America (PSA) 47th and 48th Annual Exhibition: “Enduring Brilliance!” (New York City and online: bit.ly/3Ffqp5Pf); the 26th IAPS PastelWorld Exhibition 2015 (Albuquerque, N.M.); and the IAPS 23rd Juried Exhibition Web Show 2013 (online: https://tinyurl.com/y6nuk5ar).
Howard had solo exhibits of her pastel paintings at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith in 2017; the Center for Art and Education in Van Buren, Ark. in 2016; the Bentonville Convention and Visitors Bureau in Bentonville, Ark., in 2014; and the Arts Center of the Ozarks, in Springdale, Ark., in 2013.
She has studied pastels in workshops with Liz Haywood-Sullivan, Marlene Wiedenbaum, Michele Wells, Kim Casebeer, Lorenzo Chavez, Denise Larue Mahlke, Jack Hetterich, Judy Maurer, and Charles Peer.