Artist Statement
Val Hudson grew up by the sea and has travelled extensively in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The colours from these travels are apparent in Val's palette.
Experiences of oceanic expanse, the wild and the raw colourful elements of nature opened her to the mystery, diversity and vastness of the world during which she encountered the teachings of Buddhism. She continues to be a practitioner.
The paintings celebrate what it is to be alive, to be experiencing The World. They call to a part of us that we cannot name. The paintings invite us to respond.
The paintings are often playful and engage with paradox: inside and outside; stillness and movement; form and formlessness. As such they are liminal. Meditative. The paintings use, and take us to our, “edges”.
Val works abstractly using multiple layers of oil and wax, on canvas or wood panels, which are applied over time and then sculpturally scraped back in order to reveal glimpses of what lies beneath. This process of layering and scraping back - like the archaeological dig that carefully removes the strata of time and in doing so exposes earlier realities - points us to something more essential. As acts of communication the paintings invite us into conversations that are elemental, endlessly shifting and transient. The paintings act like portals that help us see into other worlds. This reminds us that, as observers, we simultaneously act to conceptually over layer, creating our own realities, yet are also able to glimpse that which is more present and eternal.
The energy emitted by these colourful, textural, elemental works engages us with our present experience of witnessing. We are invited to be in the ungraspable moment of “now”.
These abstract paintings, like music and dance (two of Val’s many influences), are not static but are instead “alive” and move us from moment to moment. This unfixable shifting nature of the paintings is part of what makes them endlessly contemplative and fascinating.
Val has exhibited in Zurich, Paris, Stockholm, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Derbyshire and London.
