portrait of judith seligson, artist. PHOTograph by Kyle Knodell. Courtesy Paddle8.
“My paintings begin with a graphite line drawing, on paper, canvas, or a panel. Choosing colors is an improvisation, a method that has kept and intensified my interest over forty years of painting. At one stage, I abandon the ruler for my eye. The pleasure is in finding precise intervals of color and hue that move my eye around the work, never letting it rest too long in one place.”
the artist
Judith Seligson, Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An artist’s Book, Cambridge Scholars, 2021, open to pages 494-495.
Judith Seligson is an artist living in New York City and Alexandria, Virginia. The core of her work is a vast series of geometric, abstract, hard-edged oil paintings, some very small, others enormous. Each painting begins with a graphite drawing defining the blocks of color. The artist then applies layers of diluted gesso, so she can see the push and pull of the shapes, while preventing the graphite from mixing with the paint. Ms. Seligson follows Matisse’s dictum that painting begins when the artist sees both the positive shape - the vase, for example - and the negative shape - the shape around the vase - simultaneously. Thus, she does not use tape or straight edge while painting.
Her work also extends to collage, graphite drawings, visual intertextuality, multi-media, videos, published articles, and pigment prints.
Her most recent show was a solo exhibition at Galerie Mourlot (New York) in 2022 entitled The More You Look The More You See. Other solo shows include Drawing the Line (2016) at Galerie Mourlot and A Gap Frame of Mind (2016) at The Athenaeum in the Washington, DC area. In March of the same year, Her work was included in an exhibition of four contemporary geo-abstract painters at the Art 3 Gallery in Brooklyn.
Other solo shows include the Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington, DC, Anita Friedman Fine Arts in NYC, and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Group shows include Lillian Heidenberg Fine Art and Gary Snyder Fine Art, both in NYC. The artist has collaborated on a number of site-specific works with her husband, architect Allan Greenberg.
In 2021, Cambridge Scholars published Ms. Seligson’s Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book, the culmination of a 20-year project focusing on the space between things in art, science, and literature. She has given academic talks about The Gap paradigm at the Fourth International Henry James Society Conference, the American Literature Association Annual Meeting, and the 41st Annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900. Her articles have been published in The Henry James Review, Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life, The Forward, and The Radcliffe Quarterly.
Ms. Seligson studied painting with Flora Natapoff, Philip Guston, Leo Manso, and Victor Candell. She is a graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe.