Judith Goldsmith
	Paintings Exhibitions Collections Bibliography Biography Artist Statement > Archive Contact		My paintings are gestural abstractions. Each one tells a story, in the way that a piece of music tells a story in its movements, shifts in tonality, the instruments chosen as vehicles of expression, and the combination and organization of their sounds. Whatever the composer has in mind - an emotional state, a state of nature, a man-made phenomenon - war, for instance - or primarily formal relationships, the piece is, first of all, an ordering of abstract elements, and then is shaped and given significance by what the listener brings to it. I think of my work in the same way. The story of each painting is made in the painting of it, and is about the paint itself, its color, viscosity, texture, and how each color note or area helps to organize and orchestrate the whole composition. Personal references and evocations are important to me, but it is the viewer who completes each piece with her or his responses. I work in an improvisational, jazz-like way, without an initial plan, but with the paradoxical intention of eventually arriving at a classically composed whole.