About Keith Judge
For the past 25 years I have lived and worked in Norfolk after originally coming from London and then Essex. As a student I studied painting and illustration at Walthamstow and Colchester Schools of Art before going on to study photography and film at The Royal College of Art in London.
For most of my professional life I have worked in the Film and Television Industry, but I have always continued to draw and take photographs. In the late 1980s I had a one-man photographic show at the Wells Art Centre in Norfolk, and this retrospective exhibition was the culmination of 15 years of photography.
As a photographer like so many of my generation, I had been very influenced by the so called "social comment" school of photography… ordinary people in everyday situations and environments that defined the way they lived.
However although I continued to take photographs and still do, I slowly began to renew my interest in painting and drawing and in particular landscape painting. Whereas in photography I had been preoccupied with capturing people and environments in gritty black and white, with painting I was rediscovering a strong passion for colour and a love of the East Anglian landscape.
In particular I was developing an interest in places and images where I could discover strong abstract and sometimes bizarre undertones, often enhanced by sweeping diagonal lines which can give a particular landscape its own unique energy and identity.
Inspirations
As an artist I’m influenced and admire a great many artists work, everyone from Gainsborough to Tracy Emin. It’s interesting because many of us like art, particularly the paintings by the old masters. However its not until you spend a great deal of time painting yourself and then look at other peoples work both old and new that you soon realize how good they really are. I'm constantly standing in front of paintings thinking how on earth did they do that?
Like many so called 'post impressionist' painters I still do love the work of The Impressionists particularly Monet, Pissarro and Cezanne. I recently saw an exhibition of Cezanne's work at the Courtauld Collection at Somerset House and I was completely blown away by it.Cezanne was really years ahead of his time. I also love the work of the Scottish Colourists in particular J.D Ferguson and S J Peploe.
I suppose in the main I would regard myself as a landscape painter because I have largely painted little else, but recently I have painted portraits of my two children. The one on the Home page is of my son…. he wanted a painting of himself for his birthday so I did this portrait of him in my studio and he was delighted with the result. I then offered to do a portrait of my daughter, so the one on the right is of her with my youngest grandchild and I think she is also pleased with the painting.