Judith Kuehne, Vernissage

Judith Kuehne (British), Vernissage, oil on canvas, signed lower right, dated 2000 and titled on verso. Kuehne was born in Detroit, Michigan and first studied painting under Gerald L. Brockhurst RA (1945-49). She then graduated with a BSc in Design (Honours) from the University of Michigan. For many years she lived, worked and exhibited in London. Until 1979, Kuehne's work was primarily representational. Her subject matter ranged from rural landscapes to formal portraiture. Many of the paintings from this period were commissioned by the University of Kentucky and for private collections. During the 12 years that she worked in London, Kuehne explored a more abstract form of expression in her painting and new ways to apply traditional materials. Since moving to Cabrieres, a village in the foothills of the Massif Central in southern France, she has renewed her involvement with figurative painting and has developed a very personal idiom in her portraiture. Her intermittent excursions into semi-abstract landscape painting owe much to the stark topography and brilliant Mediterranean light of the Languedoc. More recently, Kuehne has been painting still life looking at the art of pottery and its involved meanings. She argues that she has always considered the fundamental elements of the natural world - the earth and the air - to be found in the development of ceramic pottery. Her early training was in pottery, working alongside Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada for a year. vernissage means a private view of paintings before a public exhibition 116 x 100cm.