Jennifer Samet interviews painter Judith Linhares about her work.
Speaking about her process Linhares remarks: "I might start my canvases with a ground of half purple and half yellow, and go from there. I work with complementary colors a lot. I do not trust ideas that come to my mind – instead, they have to come through the process, or be developed through the process. Otherwise, they look like something I have cooked up. When you put down yellow and violet, you create a sense of light, and that might suggest something. A yellow ochre on top of the yellow might suggest a backlit animal. I have a chance to surprise myself and invent the space as I work on it, rather than it being external. I am never thinking of it as flat, and I am usually thinking of it as a landscape environment. There is distant space, middle space, and near space, and things are happening in those spaces. What happens sometimes is that the idea will get developed over studies or redoing the painting. But it is very important to me that they come out of the brushstrokes, rather than being conceptualized ahead of time."