About

Judith Burns McCrea is distinguished by her vibrant color and paint handling, her narratives of sexuality and survival, and the influence of Latin culture on her imagery.  McCrea is a figurative painter who translates objects and images from the natural world into interrogations of the nature of reality.  Her disquieting images question cultural assumptions in order to shape a more humane world view. 

Within the framework of art history, McCrea can be considered a post-modernist because of her commitment to what theorists have labeled “difference.”  Her images and narratives question cultural assumptions of hierarchy and authority.  Stylistically, McCrea’s art is also about post-modern difference through her displacement of the authority of single-point perspective with sweeping, intersecting form, line, and color.

In 1988 McCrea was chosen to be the first artist to reside in Paraguay on an official basis. The richness of her experience there led to prolonged engagement with the cultures of South America.  She revels in the cultural differences created by the co-mingling of indigenous Indians, Africans brought in by the slave trade, and various Europeans.  McCrea addresses cultural difference by embracing the dynamic interplay among peoples and resisting a representation of social cohesion.

McCrea actively insisted on difference within another arena of cultural hegemony:  the machismo culture that establishes sexual desire as a male privilege.  McCrea reworks traditional narratives in order to empower female sexuality. Unlike some of her feminist colleagues, however, she doesn’t challenge the male presence in human sexuality, but seeks a communicative dialogue.

McCrea’s painterly style reflects her cultural engagement.  She employs a very physical style in which vibrant colors flow in and out of her images in great waves.  The very sweep of her style is the assertion of the subjectivity of experience over the illusion of an objective Truth.  A contemporary painter with whom she bares formal comparison is Jenny Saville, whose women, like McCrea’s, dominate large-scale canvases through their corporal mass and psychological intensity. 

McCrea was trained as a painter in Wichita by Bill and Betty Dickerson; Jim Davis was a later inspiration and colleague.  She taught painting at the Wichita Art Museum and Center for the Arts until being appointed a professor in the art department of the University of Kansas in 1993.