Someone asked me to describe my art. I use a lot of symbolism in my work and I always have some sort of story going on in my head when I'm making art, so "symbolic narrative" is what I came up with.

The hand pieces on my home page probably evolved as the result of my childhood. I grew up in historic northeast Minneapolis in a blue-collar environment. I studied my mom's hands as she hung clothes and rolled dough for pierogi. I watched with a five-year-old's fascination our next door neighbor's hands as she used her ax to decapitate a hen for dinner. And even as a kid I sensed that my family's welfare depended upon my dad's ability to use those strong hands of his to shovel coal into the boiler of a Soo Line steam engine. The folks in my neighborhood survived by working with their hands. This probably was the beginning of my fascination with them.

And while I occasionally make forays into other genres like abstraction and still life, it's those hands that, like my childhood, keep tugging at my imagination. I'm still fascinated with them--their strength, their elegance, but mostly their ability to hint at their owner's personal narrative.

My current love (and one that caught me by surprise) is writing. I wrote a lot when I taught high school English. I'd forgotten how much I missed it until I started a blog. Ten of my blog entries are now part of "Past Matters," a 21-page collection of some of my paintings and the stories that evolved as I worked on them. It's available in Minneapolis at the Fairview Southdale Hospital Gift Shop, Dabble Cards and Gift, Annona Gourmet, and at my studio. Or you can simply contact me at judy@judywestergard.com

$10 plus s/h
click here to inquire about ordering

Juried into Susan Hensel Gallery's annual art book show for 2009
"Small, Smaller, Smallest"