The Paintings of Judith McRae

Still Life

Imaginary Art

Figure Study

Landscapes

Artist Statement

Order Paintings

Download the PDF order form by clicking on the link (if that doesn't work, you might need to get the free Acrobat Reader), print it out, enclose a cheque or money order, and mail it to the address indicated. Your paintings will be shipped to you as soon as possible.

Judith can also be contacted by e-mail at jrlmcrae@shaw.ca

Biography

Judith McRae was born in Calgary, in 1961. She was educated at the Alberta College of Art in two periods - a diploma in Painting which she received in 1984, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, which she received in 2004.

She has maintained a working art studio since 1984. She has been affiliated with a number of arts organizations, including the Calgary Burns Society, and TRUCK: an artist-run centre.

Artist Statement

It's always been about elevating the mundane to the level of a kind of specialness that is called Art. One time when I was a kid, I took a bunch of junk I found in the alley, piled it on the table, and made a still life out of it. Then, I made a painting of the still life. I think I got an "A" in my art class for doing that, and it felt very strange, because it was just a pile of junk. But it was a nice kind of strangeness - very affirming.

More recently, I photographed my TV set and then used the photographs as source material for a pair of something like portraits. I liked how the "portraits" turned out. But really, they aren't portraits; in reality, they're just pictures of my TV set, with a talking head guy on it. In one, he's looking up, and in the other, he's looking down. The two paintings belong together. If you buy them, you should buy the pair, and you should display them side-by-side. But of course, once you buy them, it's no longer in my control. It's up to you. And maybe you would have a favourite, and you would only want to buy one of them. I'd still sell it to you, because I strongly believe that you should own art that you like. Once it leaves the studio, I am no longer the interpreter of what it means - you are. And you can make it mean whatever you need or want it to mean, because the transfer of art is not just the transfer of an image on canvas - it's actually a total transformation of ideas.

Art is a form of communication, but it is the sort of communication where the message received is almost never the message that was intended to be sent. Usually, the message received is way more interesting than what was intended to be sent. That's the really great thing about it. I think it would be very boring, if you understood exactly what I was thinking when I made my paintings. I think it's cool that you see and learn things when you look at my art, that never even occurred to me when I was making it.