God-Given Art Graces Local Guild Gallery
By Janet Gresham
When God gave “Sister Judy” the desire to draw and paint, He also bestowed on the Catholic nun an appreciation for the bright, the bold, the beautiful and all creatures great and small.
Her collection of art ... from Fantastic Frog and Watchful Wolf to A Wisp of Spring and Field of Color will be featured at the Selma (AL) Art Guild in January as she is honored as the “Artist of the Month.”
Sister Judy tutors and serves as art director for the St. Edmund Learning Center, where she works with both children and adults in art and literacy programs. The Learning Center is a ministry of the Edmundite Missions, founded in 1937.
Primarily self-taught as an artist, Sister Judy loved to color and draw as a child in her native Detroit. “I used to get kind of upset because my drawings didn’t look like what I wanted them to,” she said. She was exposed to art in school and worked on posters and maps but didn’t become a serious artist until she arrived in Selma 15 years ago and enrolled in art workshops. “I did watercolor with Joanna Nichols and took art class once a week with Cam Walker at the Selma Art Guild Gallery. That’s how I started hanging my pictures at the gallery,” she said.
A few summers ago, Sandy Greene encouraged her to enter a picture for an Art Guild calendar, and one of her works was among the 12 selected. “I started meeting people here, and my work has been kind of snowballing ever since.”
Last summer, she participated in The Diva Art Show at The Frame Shoppe. The show featured works by a group of local women artists. Her Southwest Treasures collage won first place in a division of the Selma Art Guild’s Juried Summer Art Show, and one of her works sold at the gallery’s Christmas Open House. She’s also received numerous art awards at the Central Alabama Fair, where her entries have included watercolors, charcoals, pencil, mixed media and ceramics.
“Sister Judy is just fearless about trying new things,” Walker said. “So many people who first start working in art as adults are very apprehensive. Children are a lot more likely to try something new, but she’s not afraid.”
Sister Judy first started taking art lessons from Walker several years ago when the class met at Wallace Community College. She continued when Walker started a class at the gallery. Walker allows her art students to choose their own mediums. “Sister Judy is versatile in that she can do mediums that include oil, pastels, watercolor and pencil. Then, she came up with her own technique for using Sharpie markers. She’s very prolific.”
She also started taking ceramics classes from Candi Duncan at the city ceramics workshop in the former Dallas Academy. “Some people say ceramics is not art, but Sister Judy uses it as a palette to express herself just as someone else uses a canvas,” Duncan said.
“If she is working on a teapot, somebody else might use a clear glaze and decal or paint it all yellow, but Sister Judy might paint and impressionistic design on it and do something that takes a long time with a lot of different colors.”
In fact, ceramics is where Sister Judy says her “creativity really comes in through the bright colors that I like to use.” She once decorated a teapot with polka dots.
Duncan adds that Sister Judy has “also gotten other people interested in the program and brings one of her coworkers from the learning center so they can do ceramics in the Edmundite art program.”
Most recently, Sister Judy was among three-dozen artists chosen to paint butterfly sculptures for the Dallas County Arts Alliance Butterfly Project. The five-foot-tall wooden butterflies are placed throughout Selma’s downtown historic district.
She worked with SELC art teacher Keyonsis Olds on the Learning Center’s butterfly, Glorious Flutterer. Again, Sister Judy incorporated a polka dot theme. “We had five different plans, but we kept coming back to polka dots,” she said. Using an orange background, they drew circles and made models for the big dots and traced around them. They chose yellows, greens and pinks, then dabbed dots with sponges between the big dots and used a black border for the wings.
Art Guild President Sally Jordan said Sister Judy’s featured works will include “some really vivid, bold and beautiful colors” and “just some really enjoyable pieces with good reds and greens and subjects such as her Southwest Treasures and chili peppers.
Other titles in the show include: Watercolor – Pink and White, Pencil - Watchful Wolf, Colored Pencil - Country Woman, Charcoal - Reaching Out, Ink - Summertime, Burgundy Blooms,” and Spider Web; Acrylic - Field of Color and Yellow Flowers, Mixed Medium - A Wisp of Spring and Raccoon Resting.
Joanna Nichols, immediate past president of the Art Guild, said she is excited about the January show. “This is the first time Sister Judy has been featured as Artist of the Month, and she’s got a lot of work that really looks lovely in the Gallery. She does very attractive, brightly colored paintings, and she definitely has her own style, particularly in the pen and ink. Her particular style goes very well with acrylics and pen and ink.”
While her work at the St. Edmund Learning Center and art/ceramics classes keep Sister Judy plenty busy, she’s also active elsewhere…at the Vaughan Fitness Center where she walks every morning, at Queen of Peace Catholic Church where she sings in the choir, and with a Weight Watchers group.
