Star Light 2005, oil on linen, 47×90”. All images courtesy of the artist and Edward Thorp Gallery, New York.

Born in Pasadena, Judith Linhares came of age amid the social, cultural, and political sea changes of the 1960s in California. A working artist since her early teens, Linhares describes a world where dreamy sunlight shines on skeletons. A deep sense of the pastoral in her work is tempered by an acknowledgement of the macabre, a flair for the grotesque, and a sophisticated wit that both sharpens and lightens the images she makes.

For the first 20-odd years of her career, Linhares lived and worked on the West Coast, where, following an early phase of abstraction, she became a figurative painter. She made her first major raid on the New York art world in the Bad Painting show curated by Marcia Tucker for the New Museum in 1978.

In 1980, Linhares moved to New York, where she shares space and her life with conceptual artist/poet Stephen Spretnjak. During the last few years, many of the surface gestures of her style have been popularized by a generation of younger painters, but her Rowing in Eden show at Edward Thorp Gallery last spring reasserted her preeminent mastery of a way of painting she has made her own throughout her 40-year career.

Linhares’s work has deep foundations, in both the compositional and the psychological sense. Her long-established habit of beginning her paintings in abstraction gives her work a solid integrity of composition that few latter-day figurative painters can rival. Meanwhile, she has blended some iconographic tactics of Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo with the expressionistic power of James Ensor and Edvard Munch. “Linhares’s imagery enters the subconscious on very much the same level as the artist herself finds it,” as Dan Cameron wrote in 1985. The result is a system of psychological signification at once profound and accessible to all.

This interview with Judith Linhares began in Edward Thorp Gallery on March 21, 2006, soon after the opening of Rowing in Eden. The conversation continued for the next few hours in various downtown Manhattan venues, then for the next three months via email.

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Issue 97 Fall 2006