Brush strokes bring artist’s memories to life
Posted By Lori Penner
Posted 5 months ago
This piece called Jumping Daisies is a great example of the work Judy Brillinger enjoys doing.
|
|
Judy Brillinger can’t remember a time when she didn’t draw. As a youngster, she would copy the comics from the newspaper, and says anyone who sat near her in the rural schoolhouse in Windsor, Ontario was fair game for a portrait “My father encouraged me by supplying me with wood to make plaques that I would draw and then woodburn. As a teenager, he built me a collapsible easel on my bedroom wall,” says Brillinger, who has a number of her pieces on display at MCI in Gretna. She started painting when her first child was born. “I wanted to do a baby picture. I knew I could draw so I took all the left over little containers of paint from a paint by number set and a piece of oil cloth I had, and next thing I knew I had painted my baby’s picture!”
A friend seeing what she had created went out and purchased a set of paints and asked her to paint a picture of a dog. With encouragement from family and friends, Brillinger began to take a more confident approach to her art, enrolling in classes and soon doing figures from life in charcoal.
“After moving to London, Ont. in 1966 I took a night class in oil painting at a high school. We moved to Elmira, Ont. in 1973 and out came the paints again,” she says. “My late husband who gave me much encouragement set one room up in the basement for my studio and I took a night class at the local high school. The following summer Cole Bowman, a well-known artist in Ontario taught me to do portraits in oil.”
In 1976, the family moved to Elora, Ont. Brillinger decided that oil paints no longer fit her lifestyle and gave watercolours a try. A weekend workshop with her favourite artist – Barry McCarthy of Fergus, Ontario made her fall in love with the medium.
She soon learned a technique called pointillism, a style of painting in which small distinct dots of color create the impression of a wide selection of other colors and blending. The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the colour spots into a fuller range of tones. People and animals continued to be her favourite subjects as she applied this new technique.
Now in retirement, Brillinger can’t even begin to guess how many paintings she’s done through the years. The ones she is most proud of depict childhood memories. “I grew up in rural Essex County, Ontario and loved the great outdoors. Every summer for our return to school in September, my mother sewed a new outfit for my older sister and myself. It was nearly always a new plaid skirt with a matching top. It was also the first picture I did in pointillism style.”
Currently living in Gretna, Brillinger is experimenting with different ways of applying watercolour and is learning to paint using coloured pencils. Instead of attending classes, she is finding the Internet is quite a great resource.
