Jude Lobe
I work as a graphic designer and visual artist. Cold Wax is my favorite medium. Although, having been an artist for most of my life, I love working in many different mediums including enameling, sculpture, oil and pottery. Nature is my muse, but more recently the southwest landscapes and Native American cultures have seeped in as muse as well. In my paintings, my desire is to capture the emotion of a scene with texture, brush strokes, glazes and colors chosen from the palette of the environment I’m painting. It’s the memory of the place or experience that I want to express. The process begins with a walk outside, then followed with quick sketches and color notes. Then back at the studio I begin to paint the images I remember.
This year my theme continues to be earth and sky and the connections between us and the natural world. Cold wax and oil affords the opportunity to bring texture into my paintings. It also shows a history of the painting by building up layers, obscuring what’s beneath, and removing parts of layers to reveal bits of past layers representing the history of a life that becomes the compilation of bits and pieces of its past experiences. But my attraction to textures is moving me to add more tactile to my art. Thus I am adding rusted silk to my mediums. In these new pieces I am combining the coldness of rusted iron with the warmth of heated forged copper, seemingly opposite forces. Two opposites actually attract and complement each other, existing in harmony, and they are interconnected in the natural world symbolized by the yin and yang.
