Judith Belzer: Weather Report

Judith Belzer is a bi-coastal painter who uses the language of landscape to try to understand and come to terms with the current environmental, political and social climate. Her most recent work explores the idea that instability and unpredictability, though anxiety-provoking, may offer opportunity for growth… and maybe even the possibility of finding peace.

For more than four decades, Belzer has utilized a technically eclectic, but always painterly, vocabulary of dammed rivers, closeups of tree bark, the locks of the Panama Canal, the intersection of the San Francisco Bay with the industrial complexes on its shores, and improbably balanced boulders – all as metaphors for personal and collective emotional states.

In her new paintings, shards of matter fling and scatter through clouds of color and light. There is no ground here. No solidity. Nor security. Explosion? Implosion? The suspended animation of the vacuum of space? There are no landmarks to help you find your way. These paintings express the distress of a world witnessing the crumbling of norms, institutions and expectations. Where are we in the arc of this toss? Will we ever land on any sort of solid ground?

Belzer has chosen to look at this national and global upheaval in the same way an artist approaches their studio practice… Embracing uncertainty and working through it. Striving for and finding compositional balance, the precariousness, though terrifying, becomes opportunity. These paintings are about the acceptance of not-knowing. They are about the lightness and relief that can be found in letting go of the burdensome misconception that we’re in control.

Judith Belzer, who was born and grew up in a suburb of Chicago, now divides her time between Berkeley, California and a small farm in rural Connecticut. She received a degree in English from Barnard College and studied at the New York Studio School.