Dragon Table Cast Bronze, Glass 18" x 60" x 24"

Today, as we stand awash – sometimes shoulder deep – in an art world market-driven, ego-tainted, tongue-tied while near buried in words, the furniture of Judy McKie appears as a singular "safe harbor". McKie’s stricture that her work remain furniture and functional may be a clue to its success, for this is not sculpture to sit on, nor art to warehouse. True, these pieces are also ritual objects going beyond function. Often bestial with four stout legs or with none, her house-broken menagerie makes maker and viewer smile, as intended.

A daughter of artists, a painter with a fine understanding of organic form, especially of the connecting parts, McKie as furniture maker is self-taught. No one daunted her with the hierarchy of rare woods, nor a litany of joinery, nor the rituals of hand tools properly pointed. If her images are often as knowingly naïf as those of Rousseau, or hauntingly stirring as Gaugin’s Noa Noa woodblocks, the results flow from common well-springs and run as purely to feed our thirst for untainted source water.

Now restored, we sense in the perception of each McKie her whole story, or perhaps, all but the last, essential aspect of it – that which goes beyond furniture making, materials and skills. Hear her account of when one of a couple of graduated painters being without furniture, and of her building sturdy, four-square pieces less hackneyed than store-bought stuffs new or old.

First mastering the fast machines in wood shops, she then appropriated hand tools to rhythmically shape sinued legs or gouge lines in planed boards. We hear of the fork at which she divided energies between legged supporting surfaces and containers more often than not embellished with high contrast relief images. And finally of the wall-hung mirrors mid-pointing the case goods and monoprints.

No one told her that women don’t make furniture. No one said that if they did, they would concentrate on one form or another, in one material, not trying at one time to work in bronze and painting and prints for both sculptured forms, often biomorphic, and at the same time containers and reliquaries where the interior and implied treasures are the point. No one told her that, with success, she would remain humble, open still to revolutions within her work and lifestyle – still simple, affable, bi-coastal, personal, highly individual.

If Judy McKie had instead become a performer (it is easy to imagine this) one senses she would have been a pied piper. To her own version of Walt Whitman’s "song of the Broad Ax" would move the merry forms of Matisse’s blue Danseurs – ourselves.

-Jack Lenor Larsen, President Emeritus, American Craft Council, Hon. RDI
 

Other images of Judy McKie works

To purchase works by Judy McKie please call 510-644-2735 or e-mail info@artworksfoundry.com

We would also be happy to keep you informed of new pieces coming out of the foundry.