Judith Nakhnikian

Making art requires uninterrupted time, thought, and solitude that have always been difficult for women to find in the midst of competing demands of job, family and community. After working full time as an artist and part time as a karate instructor, for more than thirty six and a half years I made art while raising a family and working as a criminal defense investigator. Now I am retired, and I have the luxury of time to paint.

I paint portraits, mostly of people, with the belief that what is important about humanity can be represented through the careful scrutiny and expressive painting of individual subjects, and that work can be beautiful because beauty is a kindness we can give ourselves, about ourselves.

At this time in my life, I find myself making work in which time folds and the spaces in which my subjects interact may be whole or partial inventions. My subjects may exist together in ways that could not happen in the linear time we ordinarily occupy. Perhaps this is because I am getting old, and many of the people and animals I love are gone, or going, and yet I feel them still with me, and I remember them in many phases of their lives and mine.

Life is short, and everything feels personal to me, the air, the water, the person begging on the corner, the protesters in the streets, lives lost to state sanctioned violence, my dear family, my friends, our blue world.