photography by Steve Tanner
2022 JUDY BUXTON 60 YEARS AT THACKERAY GALLERY
I remember the first time I saw one of Judy Buxton’s paintings. It was a still life, and it literally stopped me in my tracks. I was captivated, and just knew I was looking and appreciating a wonderful artist. As soon as possible, I invited her to become part of our Thackeray stable, she said yes immediately, and that was just over 15 years ago.
Since then, we have had numerous solo shows together, all incredibly successful and culminated in Judy’s work travelling all over the world to find their new homes. Every exhibition over the last 15 years have had their own personality, some focussed on her Cornish environment, some inspired by her Australian heritage, others by the local wild flowers and windows in her studio. Reflections on creeks, waves turning in the sea, flowers bursting out of hedgerows, vas sunflowers, heavy beautiful wild roses, camellias, peonies and more recently horses - whatever the subject, Judy’s great love is her material, the paint. And how she uses it. WOW. Instinctive, fast, energetic, lush, making her work sculptural. A few clients have actually said and I promise this is true, that her paintings appear edible!
It is a complete privilege to have witnessed over a decade, how her beautiful work continue to emotionally touch people, how much her paintings give us, the viewer, the potential owner, and the inevitable temptation of saying YES to living with one of them. And, clients always come back and want another and another and another. That is the greatest compliment of all.
Each painting has this DNA of the perfect balance between gentleness and strength. And that is Judy Buxton. Marking her 60th year, this special exhibition is not to be missed.
Sarah Macdonald-Brown, 2022
vents coming up
Showing AT Eastwood fine art, thackeray gallery and campden gallery in mixed exhibItions november/december 2019
BIOGRAPHY
Represented by Thackeray Gallery, London since 2010, Judy Buxton was born in Sydney in 1961. She studied at Torquay College Art Foundation 1999-1990, then Painting at FalmouthCollege of Art 1990-1993 and received a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art. Following this, Judy was awarded a bursary to studyto study at the Royal Academy Schools in Londonfor a Post Graduate Diploma in Painting from 1990-1993 and was awarded a RA PG Dip in Fine Art Painting.
In 1995, Judy moved to Cornwall where she established both her home and studio with her artist husband, abstract painter Jeremy Annear and she continues to practice today. Her inspiration is drawn from the surrounding landscape, heath, coast and river. Her large, painterly canvasses of light and reflection have a strong, physical presence .
Other themes include Still-life and Equine subjects. Studio still-lives of delicate flowers and objects , their transience requiring an urgent response, the marks on the canvasses echoing the fall of the petals on the table. The monumental , universal forms of horses and riders gives life to a figurative, bold, sculptural drawing and carving on the canvas, expressing her passion for the subject. Judy is renowned for her bold and vigorous use of paint, predominantly applied with a palette knife, each stroke defining something crucial in the composition and balance of the work.
“Judy Buxton is an artist so deeply immersed in her subject that her richly textured, expansive paintings entirely transcend the visual image: air shimmers with warmth, soft petals decay and fall, horses surge with energy and liquid surfaces gently drift; these are paintings which are felt much more than seen. ”
Over the years, Judy has received numerous awards and reviews, student prizes including the David Murray Travel Scholarship and the prestigious Sir Cyril Sweet Prize , for which she received the honour of the Freedom of the City of London. Other prizes include, Royal Watercolour Prize, First PrizeGold, Medal The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers in 1996, the Natwest Finalist and Prize Winner in 1997, The Hunting Art Prize Winner in 2005.
Judy’s work has been exhibited in Solo Shows throughout the UK since 1996 , and her work can be found in many Public, Private and Corporate Collections, both in the UK and worldwide including The Swiss Bank, Connaught Hotel, Richard Hannon Racing, Godolphin Stables and Firmdale Hotels and Falmouth University.
“For those who know Buxton’s work well, on the other hand - will think of her primarily as a landscape artist - the drawings and paintings of horses has been making her over the past year or so feel very much like a new departure, with all the exploratory fervour of a passion discovered”
Selected Publications, REVIEWS and essays
2020 Essay by Mercedes Smith for New Craftsman Gallery
2018 IMS Charity Auction (catalogue forwarded by Nicholas Serota)
2017 (click on interview to read article) Interview with Alex Wade for the Cornwall Today March Issue pages 66-69
2017 ‘Rose Hilton and Friends’ 50 years in Cornwall, Tremenheere Gallery Cornwall
2016 Interview by Adriana Dredge for Wall Street International http://wsimag.com/art/22957-lightscapes-and-water
2015 "Twofold In Art and Life" forward by Jeremy Annear. Exhibition at Lemon Street Gallery, Truro
2014 "Luminescence" forward by Graham Boyd. Exhibition at the Thackeray Gallery London
2013 ‘Seasonal art in St Ives’ September issue of Galleries
2013 "What is Revealed" forward by Mercedes Smith. Exhibition at the Campden Gallery
2012 "Judy Buxton" catalogue forward by Mercedes Smith, exhibition held at New Craftsman Gallery
"Drawn from the Ancestral" forward by Micheal Bird, September 2011
2009 "Reflected Landscape" forward by Laura Gascoigne, exhibition held at Campden Gallery
‘Contemporary Cornish paintings’ in aid of Prussia Cove (catalogue essay by Martin Clark, Artistic director Tate St Ives, Hilary Tungstall-Behrens (IMS) and Marina Vaizy)
Kit Kemp’s ‘A living space’ Hardie Grant Books Melbourne
awards
“Conjured out of a surface worked at once with a firm confidence and infinite delicacy, with its cool and chalky palette and its rich impasto, here always we find that characteristic light and open pictorial space under a diffuse and gentle light. Aha, we say, as we come upon the canvas on the gallery wall, or see it walked past it as we judge the competition, that must surely be a Judy Buxton.
”
2005 25th Anniversary Hunting Art Prize (2nd Prize) and Poster
1997 NatWest Art Prize finalist & Prizewinner, Lothbury Gallery, London
First Prize, Gold Medal, The Worshipful Company of Painter-Strainers Annual
1996 Freedom of the City of London
1993 Cyril Sweett Award, PG Painting Prize (selected from PG students at the RCA,
Slade and the Royal Academy) awarded by the
Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers
Royal Watercolour Society Award
David Murray Travel Scholarship
Creswick Landscape Prize
1992 Henfield Drawing Award
Richard Jack Portrait Award
Richard Jack Interior Award
“Marcel Duchamp bottled the Air of Paris in a glass phial, but Buxton traps the Cornish salt-laden breeze on canvas, and it remains as fresh as the day it was painted. Like her changing experience of the landscap -“every time you go it’s different’ - her images are never quite fixed, even when framed. Like Heraclitus’s river, you can never step into the same Buxton painting twice.”
“For it is the sense of isolation, of total, physical immersion in a landscape, whether of the Lizard Peninsula’s bleak, open moor lands and densely wooded valleys, where she walks almost every day, or the wild remote uplands of the Black Mountains that are the subject of sum of the newer paintings and studies in this show, and her remarkable ability then to translate those sensation, very directly, into the very fabric of the paint surface, that gives these works their extraordinary energy and verve.”