Artist Database

Judy Shear had the good fortune to study with all the greats at the University of Johannesburg: Alan Crump, Karel Nel, Colin Richards, and Jeremy Wafer, as well as with an older generation of exceptional WITS lecturers: Robert Hodgins, Guiseppe Cattaneo, Neels Coetzee, Rory Doepel and Elizabeth Rankin. She trained and taught at the Johannesburg Art Foundation with Bill Ainslie and other artists associated with the Foundation: Ricky Burnett, Lynda Ballen and William Kentridge, with whom she studied etching. Judy Shear is a seasoned teacher, equally sought after in secondary schools and in her own studio. Her work speaks to the relationship between time, memory, visual impressions and music. Much of her work refers to East Asian traditional ink painting. The variations in line and tonality structures her compositions. Her brush marks suggest the essence of a subject over direct representation. Visual stimuli from real world, art history and contemporary art are synthesised in her work in a dialogue with the painted marks, reconciling the image with abstraction.