Judith Rothchild

The American artist Judith Rothchild portrays a range of still life subjects, all observed across the seasons within the confines of her home in southern France, a village farmhouse in a small community in the Hérault. Pursuing her craft in pastel, or with the help of her vintage etching press, with a small vineyard and vegetable garden to manage alongside, Rothchild has been living here for close to thirty years, committed to a rural way of life which she celebrates in the present exhibition with a series of still lifes, at once modest and intimate, drawn from 'edible' subjects.

'In the south,' comments Rothchild, 'one gardens all the year round, and we live totally with the seasons. The garden regulates what we eat as well as what I draw and it would be as unthinkable to make a drawing out of season as to eat something at the wrong time of year. Consequently, my food subjects are always fresh, appealing to taste and smell as well as sight. It's 'nature vivante' rather than 'nature morte'.

In giving centre stage to the essential and familiar, Rothchild brings to fruition a promise implicit though never fully realized in the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin: home has become studio. Each of her subjects seems to be invested not with the analytic, invasive eye of the painter looking on (however sympathetically) from outside, but rather with a sense of profound familiarity from within. In these homely spaces just beyond the radius of light softly illuminating the picture's subject we sense human presence, other related tasks are being undertaken in a mood of quiet, ruminative harmony. Indeed, as she digests her subjects - fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese, fish - Rothchild takes them in not as so many objects observed in clinical detail but rather as if they also are glimpsed in peripheral vision, as part of a broader, peaceful ambience. Identifying with the artist/onlooker who has also cultivated the original materials, the viewer can be tempted to see each piece as pointing somewhere else, as an invitation to reverie.

The growing refinement and distillation in subject matter in Judith Rothchild's approach to still life in pastel bears witness to the influence of her work in mezzotint, most demanding of all printmaking techniques, in which she has been establishing an international reputation over the past eight or so years, with her livres d'artiste and impressive sequences of prints now represented in major public collections in France, Britain and the United States.

Biography

JUDITH ROTHCHILD was born in Boston, USA in 1950 and studied at Providence, Rhode Island before moving to Europe to continue her training at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 1974 she has been living in a small village in the Languedoc region of France. Here she decided to abandon oils and water-based media in favour of devoting herself to pastels. 'Pastels,' writes Rothchild, 'satisfy my need for intensity of colour combined with direct drawing, enabling me to develop the first spontaneous sketch into the finished image without any discontinuity'.

Some thirty one-person exhibitions of Rothchild's pastels have been held in Britain, France, Switzerland, Spain and the United States. She also produces screenprints in her own atelier and since 1996 has been working in mezzotint, producing individual prints as well as livres d'artiste, now in some forty public collections in Europe and the United States, including the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, London. She has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1985 and has participated in many of the gallery's theme exhibitions from The Lost Domain: A quest for Alain-Fournier and the world of Le Grand Meaulnes (1986) to The Art of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust (2000), Roma (2003) and to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty five painters today (2006). She has held nine one-person exhibitions at Francis Kyle Gallery since 1989.

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