Poet and visual artist Judith Ferrara, was awarded a 2003 Worcester Cultural Commission / Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship for work on her manuscript, Reciprocity: Selected Poems and Paintings . She received the Jacob Knight 2000 Award for emerging artist. Among her group exhibits are the Arts Alliance Spring Members Exhibition, Hudson, MA 2003, Central Massachusetts Women’s Caucus for Art Members Exhibit (2003-University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA), Juried Exhibitions: CM/WCA Figuratively Speaking (2003-Surroundings Gallery, Gardner, MA), CM/WCA Dark and Light (2003-Fitchburg State College) and CM/WCA Identity: Images That Reflect Who We Are, (2002-Mount Wachusett Community College, Gardner, MA), Arts Alliance Juried Fall Exhibition, Hudson, MA 2002, Fitchburg Art Museum’s 65th, 66th  and 67th Regional Exhibitions - (2000, 2001; 2002- Honorable Mention), and the Jefferson Cutter House Gallery Exhibition, “Art in Provence” in Arlington, MA (2001). Solo exhibits include Surroundings Gallery in Gardner, MA (1999), The Fine Arts Gallery at the Italian American Cultural Center in Worcester, MA (2000), the Worcester Windows: A Community Gallery Program (2001), The Worcester Jewish Community Center Gallery (2001), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (2003). She created the set design for The Moon Also Rises: A Tribute to Frank O’Hara, presented at the Performing Arts School of Worcester (2001). Photographs of her paintings appeared in the Fall/Winter 2001 issue of The Portland Review Literary Journal and on the cover of Sahara: A Journal of New England Poetry (Summer 2002).

Judy’s poem, “Elegy to a Plane Robber, Manila, May 2000” earned a finalist position in the Glimmer Train 2000 Poetry Open; “Questions,” earned Honorable Mention from judge Deborah Digges in the Worcester County Poetry Association’s Year 2000 Contest and was published in The Worcester Review ; “Poet of Iron,” was an Editors’ Choice in the New England Writers 2000 Contest and appears in The Anthology of New England Writers 2001 . “Who Are They?” earned Honorable Mention from judge Yusef Komunyakaa in the 2002 contest .She was New England Association of Teachers of English Massachusetts Poet-of-the-Year in 1993. Her poems were selected as semi-finalists in the 1995, 1996, and 1997 Worcester Magazine Poetry Contests; two poems were finalists in the 1998 contest and one in 1999. Her poems placed as semi-finalists in the 1999 Discovery/The Nation Poetry Competition. Her poems have been published in The Comstock Review, The Portland Review Literary Journal, The Black Fly Review, The Leaflet, Worcester Magazine, The Issue, Vox Poetica, Sahara: A Journal of New England Poetry and The Longfellow Journal . She is the featured poet in the Summer 2002 issue of Sahara: A Journal of New England Poetry. She has published numerous books and articles in the field of English/
language arts education and conflict resolution (Peer Mediation: Finding a Way to Care-Stenhouse; Ready-to-Use Writing Workshop Activities , Prentice-Hall).

Her first book of poetry, Gestures of Trees, is published by Mellen Poetry Press (2000). Donald Murray, Pulitzer Prize winning Boston Globe columnist, essayist and poet, writes:
"After a career in teaching, Judith Ferrara is living a life of art, exploring her inner and outer worlds in poetry and painting. In these poems she invites us to see with her eyes and, in the nature of art, we put the book down and see with our own eyes what we had not seen before. Wallace Stevens said, “The tongue is an eye” and Judith Ferrara, artist and poet, reveals the truth of what he said as her poetic lines make us see her world—and ours—with surprise and delight."  She has been featured reader at Del Rossi’s Poetry Series, (Dublin NH), The Westboro Gallery, “The Poetry Oasis” (Sahara Restaurant, Worcester), “Poets’ Parlor” (Sturbridge), Lawrence Public Library (Pepperell), Tatnuck Booksellers (Worcester), Borders Bookstore (Shrewsbury), Highland Artist Group (Worcester). She hosted a monthly poetry workshop at Borders/Shrewsbury for three years.

Artist's Statement:
In January 1998, I returned to painting for the first time in nearly 40 years. However, art was my passion during those four decades. I read about art and artists voraciously and frequented every museum and gallery in any location in which I found myself. My husband and I have been collecting art since the mid-1980s.

Since my return to painting, I have completed an average of one piece each week, while in and out of various painting classes. Courses at the Worcester Art Museum, in Provence, France and at Castle Hill, Truro Center for the Arts on Cape Cod have provided me with subject and inspiration. My painting teachers, Nan Hass Feldman and Joan Hopkins Coughlin, have given me both open-ended instruction and encouragement. In 2000, I received the Jacob Knight Emerging Artist award. 

I have come to understand that the process of painting is mysterious. When I begin to paint, it takes about several hours of intense work before I know if I have a painting. Then the painting takes over. I listen to it. I know and don’t know what I am doing at the same time. I work in a state of curiosity and wonder where the painting will take me. I give myself to it and trust the process, the mystery. I have no fear.

While I find some subjects in the real world of interiors, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes or portraits, it is not until I start to paint that I know if my subject, imagination and skills will merge and inspire me enough to produce a picture in which some meaning becomes clear. I am always asking: “But what is this painting about?” Meaning is finally conveyed to me in the language of emotions: joy, fear, serenity, or discomfort. So the root of my passion for painting is its dependence on emotion and whatever emotion dominates the subject. The search for meaning is the same if I look at someone else’s art or my own.

I am also a poet and notice similarities between the process of painting and writing poetry. If one were to examine poems from my first collection, Gestures of Trees (Mellen Poetry Press, 2000), it would difficult not to notice the many references to art. Indeed, some paintings have grown from my poems and poems have come from my paintings; I am currently working on a manuscript that features pairs of paintings and poems that have inspired each other, Reciprocity: New and Selected Poems and Paintings. I have received a 2003 Worcester Cultural Commission- Massachusetts Cultural Council creative arts fellowship in support of this project.

My paintings represent a variety of subjects and techniques. Strong subjective colors, stylized shapes and patterns dominate my work.  Acrylics, oils, oil sticks, oil pastels, pastels and pencils help me to experiment and to achieve effects that I want. As each painting emerges, I recognize my influences: Rouault, Redon, Chagall, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Degas, Hockney, van Gogh and the painters who influenced them. For example, I painted an homage to van Gogh, which is based on his homage to Millet’ s “La Nuit Etoilée.” Poet John Ashbery said, “Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.” He was talking about his style of mixing various language and tones of voice in his poems. I believe that he is also instructing me in my journey as a painter and poet.

About  Reciprocity, New and Selected Paintings and Poems

What is “inspiration”? My answer has at its root the need to act upon a strong urge to create a response to an event, a memory, an observation, or idea, coupled with an overwhelming sense of curiosity about what will emerge as I write or paint.

Most of the hundreds of poems and paintings that I make are diverse and not overtly related to each other. However, there are times when a phenomenon which I call “reciprocity” occurs. A painting may feel resolved, but the urge to continue remains, so I begin a poem. Or a poem may feel finished and something, or someone, perhaps my muse, insists, “There’s more.” My job is remain open and ready to do both and more, to begin one until it becomes the other. While my intention is that each painting and poem has its own integrity, I know that, at least in the act of creation, one is also integrally bound to the other.

The poems and paintings in this exhibition are from a manuscript which I have been working on since 1998, when I created my first reciprocal painting/poem combination.  

Acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which some of the poems in this excerpt first appeared in various versions:  The Comstock Review, The Issue, The Longfellow Society Journal , and Sahara: A Journal of New England Poetry.  This project is supported in part by a grant from the Worcester Cultural Commission, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.

Judith Ferrara