Judy Waller—Artist BiographyJudy Waller is a visual artist who lives and works on a small farm near Dade City, Florida, with her husband, dogs, chickens, goats, cows, and a reformed feral cat named Buster. The open spaces, animals and rhythm...
Read MoreJudy Waller—Artist Biography
Judy Waller is a visual artist who lives and works on a small farm near Dade City, Florida, with her husband, dogs, chickens, goats, cows, and a reformed feral cat named Buster. The open spaces, animals and rhythm of rural life provide a limitless backdrop for the paintings she creates from her memories, dreams, intuition and lived experience--a place Judy calls ‘The Edge of My Here’.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and raised on an isolated farm near the St. Lawrence River, Waller developed an early connection to animals, nature--and the kind of imaginative life that only solitude can foster.These are the influences that continue to shape the way she sees the world and the work she creates.
Over the years, Waller has lived and worked in Toronto, Tampa, San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles. While having limited formal training, these cities and the artists she worked with there were critical to her own creative development. In Tampa, she mentored with students who attended the University of South Florida School of Art, which had strong connections to the New York art world. In San Francisco, she lived at Project Artaud, an artist-run cooperative where multiple disciplines created an environment known for its spirit of experimentation and community. New York City gave her access to working with practicing artists, graduates of the School for Visual Arts, an experience that opened her work to narrative and symbolic imagery. Los Angeles proved transformative, allowing Waller to trust and reproduce the images that were emerging from her memory, dreams and intuition, and to make them the foundation of her work.
Waller’s work often features animals, women, landscapes, and worlds created out of both memory and imagination. While rooted in personal experience, the work is less autobiographical than an exploration of the possible. Familiar subjects take on a new identity when they are transformed with her emotions, intuition, and unexpected associations, creating images that exist in the place between the seen world and the inner one.
