Who Is Judith Geher's Portrayal Of Beauty?

Judith Geher is a Toronto-based artist who’s speciality is simply portraying the female form in a way that she finds beautiful. In an interview with frankie.com, Geher said that “I paint what is beautiful to me. It's very personal. I am inspired by fashion imagery, and I know that beauty or the portrayal of beauty is controversial, but I can't help succumbing to it and I paint it the way I see it”. Her strong usage of muted tones in contrast with striking spots of saturated, dark hues offer a sense of romanticism that is still rooted in reality. The dreamy and airy qualities are perhaps the things first noticed about Geher’s mostly portrait based work; the half-painted faces offering a almost classical sense of beauty due to the softness in which Geher conveys her subjects. Both the forms and execution are extremely soft and feminine and her brushstrokes almost lend themselves to evolving into floral patterns due to the muted coloring and the process of layering that

Those strokes of unfiltered and highly pigmented dark tones serve ground the piece more into reality, and to give the piece a bit more visual weight. If not for the moments of dark and saturated tones, Geher’s pieces would almost read as fantastical. In addition to contrasting the dreamy, muted tones with highly saturated hues, Geher also adds strong contrast with her underdrawings. Done in graphite, the underdrawings are typically just blind contour lines that she often leaves exposed in areas of her pieces. She leaves portions blank and allows for the human eyes and brain to fill in the remaining details with the hues and patterns that she’s already supplied in other parts of the piece. The end result is a simultaneously finished and unfinished