After an extensive career in design and marketing, Munro was drawn to launch her professional fine art career. From early childhood, she was drawn to art and was encouraged by educators to pursue a career in art. Today, Munro’s art is collected nationwide and is prized for the way she conveys the light, color and bold intensity of the landscapes and cityscapes. She paints in a unique loose style, which is perfect to capture light and shadows. Munro’s works are oil paintings on a board and most are considered representational which straddles abstract and impressionism. As Munro explains, “Most of my work is representational. I consider myself simply a contemporary painter without a specific style label.”
Munro’s paintings are bold, rich in color, and beautifully textured explorations of the emotive qualities of color and light. She has an astonishingly varied body of work. As Munro said, “My landscapes are a combination of observation, imagination and memory fragments. I take bits and pieces of sights, sounds, smells and feelings experienced and remembered and lasting impressions and put them into the painting. I’m drawn to the way realism and abstraction merge in the landscape. Lines and edges are lost and found, horizontal and vertical grids dissolve into flowing color and then restructure, and foreground and background shift and deep space becomes flat plane. The paint, its texture, color and form takes on a life of its own and becomes an equal partner in the landscape statement.”
As professional artist, Munro, takes pleasure in the active learning and the anticipation of trying out a new process or exploring a new thought in the next painting to come. She is represented by eleven galleries and retail businesses across Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Munro said, “I have always dreamt of becoming a professional, self-sustaining artist engaged in the business of selling my art. I love what I do. I can be found, five or six days out of the week, 6 hours a day, in my studio painting.” She is very popular with clients and designers; her paintings find a home quickly. In Southeast Wisconsin, you can fine Munro’s paintings at the River’s End Gallery in Waukesha.
Munro finds that inspiration happens while she is painting. Munro explains, “My painting is a spontaneous process. I rarely have a pre-conceived idea of what I want to do before sitting down to paint. Whatever appeals to me at that moment is the subject for the day. While I’m painting I don’t allow myself to analyze too much, correct or over think any aspect of what I’m doing; it needs to be intuitive. I save the analyzing for after the painting is complete.”
Munro continues, “I’ve also come to welcome the things I don’t control when I paint. They create interesting problem solving opportunities and add character to the painting. Sometimes I find an image so visually compelling that I have to paint it multiple times until I get it out of my system. I’ve had images that I’ve painted ten or fifteen times because after each painting I was still not done with it, there was more to be said and to be resolved. I use photos as a starting point reference for most of my work. Then the painting evolves independent of the initial reference, from imagination and the painting process itself. Perspective and light are often added based on my experience and training.”
For Munro, landscapes have become a way to just get lost in the process of painting. The texture of the paint, the colors, the brushstrokes and the things that happen as the edge of one brushstroke influences another, along with the structure and patterns of nature, make painting landscapes a fascinating project. Munro said, “I’m always looking for ways to destroy hard edges and details while making individual elements part of the larger whole. I want the viewer to see a recognizable image from a distance and to see a different painting, something abstract, when close up to the painting.”
In addition to landscapes, Munro I loves to paint a city at night, any city. As explained by Munro, “Night is when the jewelry comes out, the lights go on and the city becomes a place of glamorous seduction, excitement, mystery, amusement, entertainment, story-telling and sensory overload – a place to get lost in, to reinvent yourself, to emerge from, renewed and refreshed. My city is never dangerous, or sad, or lonely, it’s always an interesting and exciting place to be.” Her paintings are meant to convey the essence of the city: the lights; the movement; the energy; the structure and are therefore more “generic” than depictions of particular places.
Munro has a bachelor of Fine Arts from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan and had a scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her design and marketing career included being director of marketing services with Lionel Trains LLC and manager of graphic services for Society of Manufacturing Engineers. She has participated in more than 100 shows and exhibits, her paintings are in many corporate collections and have been featured on television set designs of Chicago Justice, Chicago Fire, Patriot, Sense 8, and Chicago P.D. In addition, Munro has received the following honors and awards:
• 2016 2nd Place, Joy And Wonder, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan,
• 2016 Best In Show-Portfolio, The River, stillpointartgallery.com,
• 2015 3rd Place, City Life, Grosse Pointe, Michigan,
• 2014, People’s Choice Award, Art Of Our Women, Port Huron, Michigan,
• 2014, 2nd Place, Color, Art, Life and Love, Port Huron, Michigan,
• 2012, 3rd Place, 38th Annual Michigan Exhibition, Mount Clemens, Michigan,
• 1975, First Place, Michigan Art Festival, Livonia, Michigan,
• 1972, Special Award, Michigan Art Festival, Livonia, Michigan,
• 1972, Special Award, Michigan Art Festival, Livonia, Michigan and
• 1971, 2nd Place, Michigan Art Festival, Livonia, Michigan.
Judy Munro’s fine art is sold at the River’s End Gallery, 380 W. Main Street, Waukesha, Wisconsin (www.RiversEndGallery.com, 262-780-1191) since 2006, and other galleries throughout the United States. Come and see an outstanding display of Munro’s paintings at River’s End Gallery.