Judith Schaechter

Artist's Statement

When I started working in stained glass as a student in 1980, I thought, ”This is the thing that will never bore me!” – of course that didn't turn out to be entirely true, but I think, over time, I have developed a true love for the medium and for its mostly unexplored expressive “painterly” possibilities.

When I went to art school, I thought for sure I would be a painter but the medium soon started feeling all wrong to me. I find few things more terrifying than a blank canvas and nothing is more easily filled with meaningless “arty” brushstrokes. I went through a phase when I would gesso over all the superfluous elements – and I would always end up staring at a white rectangle again. I can't remember why, but around that time I took a stained glass elective class. Because it was not my major, I felt free to do junk. All my life I have been a compulsive “doodler” and I began interpreting these doodles in stained glass. This was the magic moment when I understood the “secret of art” – and that I had been doing it all along without recognizing it!

With regard to subject matter, I don't have narratives in mind and am trying to be deliberately vague and open to interpretation. Telling a story is never as fascinating as snatching a moment out of time and freezing forever in space. In order to create a full picture, I am forced to supply a context for the faces I draw. The context usually includes a full body and an environment – abstract or pictorial. This context could be seen as the life and/or world of the character. So my subject could be interpreted as “people” and “life.”

As with the faces, when working on the rest of the image, I am looking for a combination of the familiar and the unexpected, the absurd and the ordinary and an image that is “all wrong in all the right ways.” All the things I was told in art school that I couldn't do because they “are not art” are things I am irresistibly attracted to now. It would be misleading to speak about the significance of my work as if it came from some kind of master plan or philosophic stance. I rely mostly on my intuition when making work and I tend to understand it only with hindsight. Cliched and sentimental subjects and decorative designs fascinate me – not just as a forbidden fruit and not as a strategy for ironic commentary but because this is the stuff, that time and time again, I am obsessed with, in love with and that I have faith in.

– JS

Artist's Bio

Judith Schaechter is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, New York.

Selected Recent Exhibitions: 2010 – Judith Schaechter: A Relentless Pursuit of Perfection, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama. 2009 – Judith Schaechter: A Relentless Pursuit of Perfection, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, Virginia; Ashes to Ashes: Life and Death in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, Virginia; Forever Young, Abington Art Center, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania; Seriously Stupididity, Shadow's Space Gallery (Kung Fu Necktie), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists, Dabora Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Pretty is as Pretty Does, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico.