In his extraordinary autobiography, the historian Henry Adams wrote, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” As an undergraduate student of painting at Syracuse University, Judith Stewart studied with the sculptor Dominick Angelo who introduced students to the work of the contemporary Italian sculptors Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzú. His lasting influence was that he “taught students to ‘see’ sculpture not frontally, but at the edge, along the contour, where form is established.

Later, when teaching painting at the University of West Florida, Judith received a grant to go to Italy where the subject of her paintings was “Roman sculpture in the context of today, as encountered in museums, in the forums and public spaces of the cities, often as fragmented remnants in unexpected places.”

While in Florida, she took a class in bronze casting. Part of the process was “pouring wax out onto wet a cloth and when it was cool enough, ripping it up into random pieces and sticking them together to see what you get,” she says.

Today, the beauty and immediacy of the process continues in her work in clay, maneuvering large slabs into female forms. “Clay gives me a lot of freedom to make form,” she explains. “50% of each piece is suggested by what the clay wants to do. That’s very important to me-- the back and forth between process and the idea. I’m open to the surprises.”

She writes, “New figures are not conceived externally, as drawings or models fully realized. Rather they exist inwardly, unformed, waiting to be formed. My pieces are never anything I have seen, but a merging of many things I have seen, images, histories and memories accumulated throughout my life. Intuition guides the building and shaping of a sculpture, bringing ideas forth while allowing the materials used to declare and keep their own rich natures. The demand put upon materials to hold form, and the hope that a human presence will emerge with a unique identity, is for me the fascinating part of creating sculpture about the human body.”

The human presence emerges in her sculpture Flora II at Evoke. She is titled Flora II because the first Flora collapsed in the kiln--one of the hazards of clay firing. The figure was inspired by Renaissance portraiture, especially profiles and the line of the edge of the figure.

“The edge tells me if it’s right or not,” Judith explains. “You can see the muscle, how the back curves to buttocks and the hips. The construction of the human form is amazing. When people look at a sculpture, they usually look at the center and identify it. That’s good enough for most people. I’d like them to see the form at the edge--off the shoulder to the elbow to the wrist. If the sculpture is displayed on a rotating pedestal, the edge changes. You see the full beauty of the line.

“The essence of Flora’s pose is her repose,” she continues. “She is quiet fully occupied with holding the flower and being quiet.” The word repose has its roots in the Greek and Latin words for pause and rest. Flora, herself, is the Roman goddess of flowers and spring.

My own response to Judith’s sculpture is one of calm, similar to settling into a state of meditation. She is a physical presence in her natural nudity, united with the rest of Nature as she holds a simple flower. Judith comments that the tulip-shaped flower “echoes the uprightness of the torso. I didn’t set out to do a figure that’s quiet. I was fully occupied with the shape of the torso and the line of the back. I don’t know if I was aware of the quietness at the time.

“A feeling for calmness comes from my admiration for the sculpture of the Greek Charioteer at Delphi. There’s a subtle little twist to his body. He’s totally self-possessed, ‘I’m internal.’ He has presence. It’s like observing people when they don’t know their being watched. They’re quietly being themselves.”

A reference to Greek sculpture also occurs in her sculpture Large Oracle. “I liked the clay study of this pose so much that I had it scanned and enlarged in foam that I dressed out from there in plaster.” The draped figure recalls the caryatids who support the porch roof of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens. This one has decided to take a rest.

Oracle, Arizona, is where Judith lives, in the Rancho Linda Vista Arts Community. She had traveled through Arizona when her father worked in the oil fields and remembered the area “the purple shadows and the feel of the desert.” Looking to move from Florida she visited a friend in Tucson and visited the office of the local arts council where she was told to visit Rancho Linda Vista. “I saw a woman coming out of the post office,” she relates, “and since she looked like an artist I followed her and asked her about arts opportunities. She told me she knew the woman running the guest artist program at Rancho Linda Vista. When I met her, she signed me up. I came here in 1991and I knew I wanted to stay. Art is the center of the community and I’m surrounded by other artists. It’s my forever home.

In Oracle, she came upon a vintage photo of a local woman dressed in jeans and a checked shirt and holding a snake. “It said something about a strong woman,” she relates. “I took it to the next level.”

Girl Holding a Snake is an example of her constructed figures and her fending off realism. “I don’t want to fake that I’m trying for super realism,” she says. “She has arms that are stuck together. I want people to also admire the material”. On a whim she decided to paint the girl’s hair with red acrylic and to highlight the texture of the snake in blue.

Her experiments with color carried into Flora 3 in which a color wash highlights the pattern of the lace she pressed into the surface of the wet clay before it was fired. The nudity of Flora is softened by the lace, removing it from being seen as possibly prurient nakedness. “I wondered how to protect the figure and not make it sexualized,” she comments. “The lace is a boundary to the invasive idea. “I have an empathy for the female form. I know it very well. The essence of the feminine is built into the form. I want people to get enjoyment from the beautiful lines and everything the female figure contains.”