Judith Symons - Paintings and Drawings

Judith Symons is 56.  After Art College she trained as an art psychotherapist at Goldsmiths.  While her son was growing up she continued to paint and draw and trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at AGIP. She has had a studio with SPACE since 1983. Some of the large paintings, of which one will be shown, have taken so long that each mark is now like a dream or diary of the days of the years she has lived - in contrast to the large outdoor wind pastels, which take about 90 minutes. 

This show documents her explorations based on the motif of the water surface and its shadows and reflections. We see the sky reflected deep in the water and vertiginously we can fall down and down into the empyrean. The shadows of branches on the surface she may trace, almost literally, working en plein air to large sheets of paper. The surface also carries its flotsam and it is through this screen that we view the depths/heights. But these pictures have little of the perspective, which a photograph might give. The actual surface of the paint tends to prevail over the illusory depth of the picture and it is its tactile quality, which is of most importance to the artist.

It is only with study and acquaintance that this viewer can resolve the implied space and look through the saturated colour and tangible texture of the object itself. Its seductive concrete qualities hold our attention and compete with the view in depth as the Necker cube, the famous visual illusion of the psychology course and the magazine inverts from one perspective to another as “the dull brain perplexes and retards”, habituating to one view so that the other breaks through. This alternation of views might be taken as an exploration of the implications for psychoanalysis of the binocular vision. We need to be able to see things more ways than one.

So the world below represents but differs from the world above. Similarly does the world within represent the world without. Point to point it echoes the physical world within the constraints of time and wavelength our bodies apprehend. Beyond them in the instant and the eon, in the ponderous frequencies and the shrill the thing remains immaculate in itself. And our view is coloured, rather more than Symons colours hers, by our associations so that we see not topology but mood. Thus did the brutal, untamed terrains of the baroque become the sublime, transcendent vistas of the enlightenment and the romantic.

But Symons is concerned not with the transports of the extreme but with the miraculous of the quotidian. The miracle of being here at all, of the richness of vision, of its precision of representation, of its freedom in emotional evocation. She encourages us, in the consulting room and in the “real world” to be witnesses to creation, the creation of the mind which finds the world and the creation of the world in itself.