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About the Artist

                                          Artist statement:
         “My task is to paint the best paintings that I can paint”   

Judith Drew Schubert is a professional fine art painter living and working on Martha’s Vineyard. Her preferred medium is oils but she is no stranger to gold foil accompanied by acrylics. Painting en plein air is the start (if not the finish) to most of Judith’s warm season landscape or seascape compositions. However with New England weather, Judith’s thin skin and her love for painting birds, studio painting is the lion’s share of her time with the brush.   


  “I like to be precise when painting animals, waves and the quickly changing clouds of sunset. That is the Virgo in me. Whether I am starting a panel en plein air or spending time in an environment gathering input by simply experiencing the changing light and adding reminders with photography, my goal is to bring that mood, experience and character of my subject into my paintings.  More often than not, birds, waves and clouds move too fast for me to render them accurately so my studio is my haven to get lost again in my time spent out in nature.” 

 For close to 30 years, Periwinkle Studio, an old fish market on a back street of Oak Bluffs ( which has since developed in to The Oak Bluffs Arts District) has served wonderfully as her well lit studio.  

 

“For me studying is an important part of gathering the tools one needs to successfully execute an inspiration. But what is equally as important and one might say; the hand that uses those tools, is a connection to the inner primordial source of creativity. The focused act of observation, either out in the field or in my studio along with a sitting meditation practice, is what helps keep that connection open and limits preconceived ideas from influencing what I am actually looking at or painting. This bypassing of the “thinking brain” allows me to paint from pure inspiration with little (hopefully no) influence from any preconceived ideas.”
 

Over the years She has studies with: Ellen McClusky, Rez Williams, Margery Mason, Liz Taft, John Traynor, Yves M. Larocque Ph.D, bird painting with The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and most recently on line live classes with Ian Robert.  
 

 Judith received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University and worked for Waverly Fabrics as a surface pattern designer and colorist in NYC. Shortly after moving to the Vineyard in 1986 she started her own blocked clothing business, supplemented by working as a house cleaner, kitchen designer and Chilmark Chocolates employee.  She ran that  business for 20 years before transitioning to the natural world painter she is today.

 

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