Judith Trott-Guy: Paintings in Ordinary Time

Judith Trott Guy’s exhibition “Paintings in Ordinary Time” featured oil paintings of interiors and still lifes, celebrating the visual beauty found in familiar surroundings. 

Judith Trott Guy is committed to the act of drawing and painting as a way of truly seeing the world.  In describing the work selected for this show, she says “I spend a lot of my time when I’m not painting thinking about how I would paint whatever I’m looking at. Wayne Thiebaud, a painter who is often on my mind, said, “You can never paint well enough, hard enough or long enough, but the doing of it — just the pure pleasure of picking up that stick with some hairs on it, dipping it into some color or something, then taking it to this flat surface and trying to make a little visual world — what a wonderful challenge. We are privileged.” I agree that this is a terrific privilege to get to spend my time translating the world, finding the beauty in the breakfast dishes, looking for the opportunities in the ordinary.

I took my first art class when I was 12, from an artist in my neighborhood, a watercolorist who had also taught my father and his friends when they were children. She told me that she would not teach me to draw but rather to see. I have held onto that notion for these many years. That’s why I spend a lot of time painting in my kitchen, struck as I am by the light, shadow, and space of my most familiar objects. In college at the University of Virginia, I concentrated on printmaking and photography, but also studied painting. My graduate degree from the University of Delaware is in printmaking and photography, all black and white. A trip to France in 1997 reminded me of everything that I love about color. Since then, I have been working on images of ordinary time, domestic moments, what I love about the things and people around me.”