Judith Lodge

Judith Lodge (born July 25, 1941) is an American Canadian painter and photographer who often explores how the two mediums play off of and inform one another. Her abstract portraits of memories, situations, events, and people are inspired by the unconscious, dreams, journals, and nature. She has worked in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Banff, Minnesota, and New York, where she has lived for more than thirty years. Background Lodge was one of four daughters born to Jean Lodge in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her father, James, was a chemist at 3M who enjoyed throwing pots in his free time and built a tiny studio in the basement of their home. From as early as the fourth grade, she would bring a large pad of paper to class and tell people, "You make a mark, I’ll make a drawing from it." She completed a Bachelor of Science at Macalester College in St. Paul (1963). She received a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (1965), where she was the only woman in a class of 12. In the summer following her MFA graduation, Lodge made numerous trips to New York City, where she attended large Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon retrospectives. These exhibitions were greatly influential on Lodge as they exposed her to approaches in art practice which were not being taken up by the Cranbrook school at that time. Artistic career In 1972, Lodge moved to Vancouver, where she would spend the next decade, and began to work less figuratively than in earlier years. In Vancouver, she was friends with many women who were active in the women’s movement. She had her first entirely non-figurative solo exhibition in 1977 at the Surrey Art Gallery. At some point, Lodge expected to return to figurative work but became preoccupied by the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the abstract format. Her inspiration from nature is greatly credited to time spent on an island off the coast of Vancouver, which was partly owned by a friend. Here, she explored landscapes and notions of water. Although Lodge returned to the United States in 1980, moving to New York after finding Vancouver a discouraging place for artists, she continually aims to recreate the feeling of nature in British Columbia. Lodge notes how dreams and unconsciousness bring things to one’s attention, and claims she began making painted mandalas out of nowhere before finding out she had cancer.