Portfolio: Judith Linhares

by Timothy Cahill, August 24, 2007

From a distance, Judith Linhares’s paintings are pure candy-coated fantasies. The colors strike you first, pinks and purples, phosphorous greens, aqua- and ultramarines. Nothing is the color it should be, if by should you mean the palette of the natural world. Linhares is too busy creating her own reality to take dictation from the everyday. Or maybe she’s memorized some secret text, the channeled dreams of Minoan dryads, perhaps, or the chronicles of a forgotten faerie saga. There is a gleeful naivete to her pictures of women inhabiting forests and seasides, an innocence that reveals a deep playfulness governed by freedom, abandon, ecstasy. Linhares’s women, like her colors, break every rule of propriety, not out of defiance, but with childlike, original-face innocence. They gambol and cook and ponder in unselfconscious nakedness, clothed in joyful sensuality, often on their backs or in other sexually submissive positions. For all their hedonistic oblivion, though, there’s a knowingness in each woman’s expression, and nary a distressed damsel in sight. The Aegean queen daydreaming in the surf, the hag playing the guitar, the voluptuary watering her horse, the she-imps swinging from trees—each displays an inborn inner strength, a wellspring of hardheaded mystical insight.

In New York, Linhares has the devoted following of a painter’s painter, an artist other artists, including younger artists, draw inspiration from. In 1978, she was part of the celebrated “Bad Paintings” exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker, a show famous for its conglomeration of painters flouting aesthetic virtue in favor of expressive vigor and individual voice. The show conferred a measure of notoriety on each of its participants and, in Linhares’s case, finally convinced her to move from her native California to New York, where she has lived, taught, and painted ever since. During the summer, she and her husband relocate to a restored farmhouse in the Schoharie Valley, a homestead surrounded by oceanic fields of corn. There, she paints daily in an outbuilding converted into a large studio drenched in light from windows on two sides. Small preliminary paintings hang tacked up everywhere, and a series of half-finished canvases leans against the walls. Linhares mixes her colors in individual containers and, one color at a time, goes from canvas to canvas—a brush stroke here, a swath of pigment there—working several pictures simultaneously, like the chess sharps in Washington Square Park who take on five opponents at once. Watching her move with such deft confidence, you see where the savvy of her painted women comes from. In that regard, every one of her pictures is a self-portrait. Selections of Linhares’s work are on view at the University Art Museum at the University at Albany’s uptown campus. “Judith Linhares: New Work,” curated by Great Barrington poet and gallerist Geoffrey Young, is on view through September 30. (518) 442-4035; www.albany.edu/museum.