Judy Antill is regarded as one of Australia’s foremost seascape painters – having worked (often on location) along its rugged shores for over 35 years. Up until the late 90s she exhibited with commercial galleries but her leaning towards Human Rights concepts saw her break away to run her own gallery spaces in Australia and London. She has also exhibited at the Florence Beinnale and in New York and has a large international following.

The following is a quote from Art Journalist Wilson Wong regarding Judy’s New York exhibition ‘Xenophobia’:- Judy Antill is a painter with a great many strong feelings about the war in Afghanistan, the plight of asylum seekers trying to gain entry to Australia, and other hot-wired topics. However, while her preoccupation with issues of human rights and politics provides inspiration for much of her work, and she has been dedicating each series of paintings that she executes to various human rights causes since 1998, she is by no means a social realist in any conventional sense of that term. For the figurative elements in her work, which are often quite abstract, evolve from what she refers to as natural mark making during the painting process.

In this regard, Antill’s approach to subject matter is akin to that of the British painter Francis Bacon, whose figures are also generated in the act of painting. Antill’s style, although hardly as grotesque as Bacon’s, is equally energetic, with fluent strokes and creamy impastos that lend her paintings a palpable physicality to complement their bold colours and powerful delineation of form. Both the intuitive way of working and the rugged immediacy of her paint surfaces adds to the emotional resonance of her imagery.

These qualities are very much in evidence in ‘”Requiem for Asylum Seekers drowned off Christmas Island, Oct 2001” – one of the paintings in Judy Antill’s exhibition “Xenophobia” – like other paintings in Antill’s new series, this is ostensibly a seascape painted with her usual bold vigour, the cerulean blue waves laid down in broad, flowing, rhythmic strokes, their foamy white tips curling up in frothy impastos. The picture initially strikes the viewer as a majestic tribute to the sea’s natural beauty. Then one looks more closely and notices the prone figurative forms emerging from or perhaps one should say merging with – the rugged rock-croppings piled up in the foreground. Given Antill’s expressionistic paint handling, which renders her forms simultaneously palpable and abstract, these figurative elements could either be the actual bodies of doomed asylum seekers who have washed up dead on the shore where they hoped to make a new life – or their spirits, now one with the land and haunting it by their presence. Either way this painting is a powerful statement, as are other major paintings by Antill, such as Slap in the Face – Salty Sting of Disappointment”, “Lest we forget” and “Ethnic Memories 1”

In each of these paintings the artist seduces the viewer with what appears to be a pleasant, picturesque seascape that suddenly turns into a powerful cry of social outrage, as the crashing surf morphs into eerie ghostly voices. Indeed, it is the special gift of Judy Antill to make even the most harrowing subjects so aesthetically appealing that we are compelled to view them unflinchingly, perhaps for the very first time, unable to turn away from her urgent human message.