Judith Irwin is an artist and a landscape gardener living in Berkeley California. Irwin received a BFA from California College of the Arts in 1996. Art and nature are a part of Irwin’s daily life, as she can be found artistically pruning someone’s garden, or studying shadows with paintbrush in hand. Irwin’s shadow compositions illustrate the images that are forever changing under the moving sun. Capturing a shadow on canvas is freezing a moment in time, despite nature’s life cycles continuing on, seasons changing, plants falling in and out of bloom.

Irwin may observe a shadow for a day or two, waiting for the time that best displays the structure of the plant.  She then searches for a delicate, crisp projection that inspires the painting before that image is distorted by time. Irwin loves the feeling of a brush having contact with canvas and carving out a stroke, but also mixing the colors that nature has chosen for a plant and applying that to her work.