Up high with Judy Graham
Silverton artist explores the local landscape in ‘Mountain’

Artist Judy Graham takes a load off on the porch of her Silverton home, “The Painted Lady,”last Saturday. The current exhibit, “Mountain,”features 13 of her paintings of local landmarks and is being presented by the Mountain Studies Institute in conjunction with a recent global warming conference./Photo by David Halterman

by Jules Masterjohn

Landscape has been and continues to be the template for many painters, serving as a way to show the manner and mood of locations throughout the world. For Cézanne, it was Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence in France, which he painted nearly 60 times, studying the illumination on the limestone rise. Van Gogh had the fields and orchards around Arles in the south of France, where he made more than 50 drawings and paintings. O’Keeffe “owned” Pedernal and suggestive land features near Abiquiu, in northern New Mexico. Albert Bierstadt immortalized the mountain ranges of the West in hundreds of paintings, preparatory sketches and studies.

Silverton artist Judy Graham is a bit like each of her predecessors. Out on foot and on horseback, Graham shares Bierstadt’s interest in the unspoiled character of remote mountain regions, spending weeks above tree line. Cezanne can be seen in her somewhat cerebral approach to her subject, depicting the mountains in their simplified, geometric forms. Like O’Keeffe, her exuberant feelings for the landscape’s beauty are recorded in a lively, mostly naturalistic palette. Graham also overlays a feminine perspective onto the scenery, where the intimacies – the folds and crevasses – of the earth’s structure are explored. Graham’s paintings are eloquent invitations to know these places and, at the same time, contemplate the vastness that these far-reaching perspectives suggest: infinity.

The riveting point of view above tree line inspires Graham to consider her place in the cosmos. She offers, “I am interested in what the idea of the infinite holds. Above timberline, there is an incredible feeling of space, of infinity. There is something about feeling small within the hugeness of the mountain landscape that enables a sense of connectedness.”

With a philosophy of interconnectedness underlying her work, it is fitting that her current exhibit, “Mountain,” is co-sponsored by the Mountain Studies Institute (MSI) and the San Juan County Historical Society, both in Silverton. The exhibit is the first foray into the arts by MSI and was planned in conjunction with a global warming conference hosted by the group last month. More than 200 people attended the conference reception at the San Juan County Mining Heritage Center, where Graham’s 13 paintings, mostly diptychs and triptychs (two- or three-paneled works), are on display.

There is something matter-of-fact about Graham’s landscapes. It’s as if she is stating, with color and composition, “this is what can be seen at Starvation Pass or Eldorado Lake.” Her paintings are devoid of the strong emotionalism found in many Romantic landscapes, where the sky is brooding with sentiment and the land overwhelms human scale. Perhaps her cool regard comes from wandering around the Continental Divide for weeks at a time. “Some of my friends think I have gone over the edge,” she said of her solo treks into the Weminuche Wilderness with just her dogs as companions for warmth, protection and as pack animals. “Life gets pretty down to earth in the wilderness … I am forced to be in the moment, much like a meditation.”

Insight into her personal and creative process can be found in the collage components of each diptych. In “Coming from Lost,” the smaller collage panel holds some keys to Graham’s feelings about the Lost Lake area and is a tribute to her elk hunting acquaintances. Things like partial USGS topo maps and photographs of the area orient the viewer to the lay of the land depicted in the painting. Graham helps out further by placing arrows from the photos to the map. Post-it notes mark other places along her way; portions of her elk hunting license and ivory from her own elk are pasted to the surface; a palette of mixed-blue paint shows her efforts at matching the sky’s color to a photograph. These actual and conceptual markers show us the route she has taken, both in the physical world and in her mind. Graham uses collage elements in a seemingly casual way, as if these things were attached to the side of her easel or on the front of her fridge. With this diary-like style, she intends to make her process more accessible to the viewer.

Graham’s diptychs seem rooted in a desire for the viewer’s consciousness to be expanded beyond one’s physical boundary and into the limitless horizons she provides. In her artist’s statement she writes, “In a compressed and metaphorical form, whether it is the land or a land substitute (a painting), we can get an idea, a glimpse of something beyond ourselves and our lives here. The detail of place and thing holds the purpose of suggesting something other than itself. How or when the local implies the universal is interesting to us. A place or a thing can be a veil over what we yearn to understand, a portal. The science of place and thing is, in itself, mysteriously wondrous but the essence is infinite.” •

Meet Judy Graham at a wine and cheese reception Sat., July 26, from 5-8 p.m. at the San Juan County Mining Heritage Center, 1569 Greene St., in Silverton. “Mountain” is on display through July 31. Graham’s work can also be viewed online at www.judithgraham.com. In Durango, 10 of Graham’s commissioned paintings are on permanent display at the Bank of Colorado.