There might be a name for it, but I’ve never heard it. In my lifetime, I’ve met a few people like this. They have a gift for choosing the most beautiful home and with very few adjustments make it the cutest, most pleasant and positive place on earth. Now that I think about it, they were all beautiful, delicate females with deep blue eyes; all seemed unaware of their talent, acting as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world–while I sipped tea with a true forest honey, which they’d served me as I kept repeating how beautiful their home is.
This is how I felt when I entered the Bushwick home of artist Mary Judge. It was a beautiful crystal clear day; pale yellow sunlight could almost make me forget about the icy snow cracking under my feet. I met Mary just a couple of days earlier, at the opening of her current exhibition at Storefront Gallery, and now I am standing in front of her house with my index finger on the doorbell. When she opened the door, I swear that the snow in a three-foot radius melted.
She directed me to her studio. I passed flowery old-fashioned wallpaper in the hallway, a wooded banister and cracking wooden staircase, to enter a large sun-drenched room full of neatly organized tubes of paint and painting brushes. Mary’s work hangs on the walls: tender flowers in soft pastel colors. Mary explains how moved is she by nature’s objects: a stone, a tree or a flower. When I look out of the window I see the backyards of a line of houses, a swing, tall gray trees sleeping under a layer of snow. Mary smiles.
She has traveled a lot, to Europe, Asia, Australia. You can feel the influence of her journeys in her house– a Japanese door, Italian curtains. Mary teaches at Parsons and giggles when she tells me she has a great life, full of social events. My blue cup is still warm when I place it empty on her kitchen table.
The final week of her exhibition at Storefront has just begun.