The Abstracts Series
Judith Weinshall Liberman
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The vast majority of my abstract works, just like my non-abstract works, are part of a series. Some of my abstract series are PATTERNS, NUMBERS, CHARTS, HARMONIOUS RECTANGLES, THE LIGHT SERIES, THE KINETIC SERIES, MAPS etc.

Some of my abstract works, however, remained solitary works and were not followed by a series of works exploring the same theme. The reasons for some works being "solitary" varied; most often, it was my emotional need to explore a new theme rather than a conviction that I had exhausted the one already dealt with that made me abandon the pursuit of a whole series. A case in point is my painting entitled "Transparency", which I created in 1987. After creating that work, I thought I would create a whole series of paintings exploring transparency. However, after creating a second work dealing with the subject - called "Transparent Rectangles" - I was irresistibly drawn to the subject of the Holocaust, a subject which was to be the main focus of my art for the next fifteen years. First in a series of HOLOCAUST PAINTINGS, then in the HOLOCAUST WALL HANGINGS and, finally, in my SELF PORTRAITS OF A HOLOCAUST ARTIST, I explored the Holocaust and my own preoccupation with it - and never returned to the intriguing subject of transparency.

The HARMONIOUS RECTANGLES series was created in the late 1970s. After working on my VIETNAM series in the early 1970s, I felt the need to escape from the expressively muted colors I had used in that series. I also sought refuge in geometric abstraction from the many figurative series I had created. The HARMONIOUS RECTANGLES series afforded me an opportunity to use brilliant color within the format of geometric abstraction. Each of the works in this series is composed of a series of spiraling rectangles of equal relative proportions spiraling from the outer reaches of the work toward the center. Although a handful of the works in this series were muted and monochromatic, I especially delighted in using various color palettes that would successfully work together in drawing the viewer into the paintings.

The LIGHT SERIES represents an attempt to capture, in a two dimensional medium, the mystery of light. The series utilizes the humblest of materials – colored tissue paper – to create mosaics in which dots of brightly colored paper gradually give way to those of lesser chroma until they disappear in a mass of dark. Each dot is glued individually, sometimes in layers of two, three or more, to take advantage of the transparency of tissue paper and achieve the gradation desired. The work is painstaking; it starts from the brilliant core of the image and, like light itself, moves gradually out to the edge of darkness.

In the SQUARES IN SPACE series, painted in the late 1970s, I explored the power of geometric shapes painted in flat colors on a flat white background, to convey movement in space. I delighted in observing how the spacial relationship between the ribbons of color in the paintings was not static.

I created the WHAT IS ART? series in the late 1990s. In four works - two of them diptychs, the other two triptychs - I raised some of the fundamental questions which have haunted artists through the ages: What is art? How do you convert a landscape into art? What is a painting? Is a blank canvas, or one painted with a flat coat of paint, a painting? Although the questions raised by the paintings were serious, the paintings themselves were intended to inject some humor into the age old debate. This is evident not only from the small scale of the paintings but also from their flat colors and their brightly colored frames, which I painted as an integral part of the works. The WHAT IS ART? series was exhibited at my "Escape into Color" exhibition at the Depot Square Gallery in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1998.

The NUMBERS series was one of my earliest - if not the earliest - series of abstract works I ever created. In the 1970s, after the Vietnam War, I found the need to escape from the expressively muted colors of my VIETNAM series into brilliant color. This I did both in my figurative works of that period (such as the WOMEN series) and in my abstract works. In each of the works in the NUMBERS series I used bright colors against a contrasting black. The colors in each of the paintings of the numbers 0-9 were split complementaries. I so delighted in the use of brilliant colors that I created several series of these numbers. Although the enclosed slides represent some of the smaller works in the series, several of the numbers were also rendered on a much larger scale - 60" by 30"; these were donated for permanent installation to the Solomon Schechter Elementary School in Newton, Massachusetts.

The MAPS series was created in the 1990s. Over the years, I had used maps as an integral part of several of my major series of artworks, such as the HOLOCAUST PAINTINGS, the HOLOCAUST WALL HANGINGS and the BIBLICAL HISTORY WALL HANGINGS. The function of maps in those series was to give a spacial grounding to the representation of historic events. In the MAPS series, on the other hand, my purpose was to explore my own surroundings and to express, through color, my joy at living in Newton, Massachusetts, the so-called "Garden City". Some of my maps of Newton are in the permanent collections of The Jackson Homestead Museum in Newton and of the Newton Free Library. The maps of Lexington, Massachusetts, were inspired by my membership in the cooperative Depot Square Gallery in Lexington and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of our National Heritage in Lexington.