“I love art — all kinds and styles of art — but I am especially drawn to landscape painting, and that is what I have chosen to focus on in my own artwork. Landscapes can transport the viewer to new places or evoke memories of places already visited. They often trigger an emotional response through the use color, lighting, texture and composition.
My soft pastel paintings portray scenes around northwest Arkansas and the Hudson River Valley in New York, where we moved in 2018. I like to study what I call the quiet places — a field along an old highway, a group of trees in the sun, an old gravel road, the bank of a creek — scenes that most people drive by and don’t notice much. I also love to paint old buildings that seem to have interesting stories to tell.
The thing that first catches my interest is the light. Every artist says at some point it’s all about the light, but for me, it’s really about how that light reveals textures and patterns, highlights and shadows, rich colors and subdued tones. Using soft pastels, I manipulate the basic elements of art — line, shape, texture, color and value — to represent a certain place and time with depth and dimension. I strive for my painting scenes to be believable, not necessarily totally realistic.
These scenes often seem familiar and comfortable to viewers and bring back memories of similar places they’ve visited. I want viewers to appreciate all those textures, patterns and colors in the quiet places and simple scenes all around us.
Soft pastels are made of pure pigment combined with enough binders to hold the pigment particles together in stick form. I use a variety of brands of pastels in varying degrees of hardness or softness on sanded paper and colored pastel papers. The pigment particles catch and reflect light, giving the paintings sparkle and life that shifts as the light on the painting changes.
All of my paintings are framed under glass; some are matted in narrow metal frames, while others are in plein-air frames (without a mat).
I hope visitors enjoy my interpretations of the quiet places in the vibrant medium of soft pastels.”
— Judy Howard