Judith Danielson
Judith Danielson is an artist working from Dexter, Oregon. She retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 2011 after more than 50 years in various fields of science, including 20 years as supervisory genetics forester at the U.S. Forest Service Dorena Genetic Resource Center in Cottage Grove. She grew up in East Hartford, Connecticut and has a B.S. in biology from Bates College (1958), and an M.S. in wildlife biology (1961) and an M.S. in forestry and botany (1988) from the University of Montana. She has been a part-time CEP student at the University of Oregon Department of Art since 2009, studying drawing and painting, and studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC in the early 1970s. She spent 2 tours with the U.S. Peace Corps in the 1960s, as a high school teacher in Nigeria and then as a community craftsperson organizer and product and advertising designer in Bolivia in the late 1960s.She was chairwoman of the mathematics department at a girls’ high school in Silver Spring, MD for 4 years in the 1970s before moving with her 3 children to Hamilton, MT in 1975, working for the U.S. Forest Service, first as the first female counselor at the all-male Trapper Creek Job Corps Center, and then as a grader’s chaser on the Bitterroot National Forest road crew, and then as a range technician and reforestation technician and forestry technician supervisor for Darby Ranger District. In 1989, she moved with her partner to Oregon, first as a technician with Ashland Ranger District, and then eventually as a supervisory genetics forester for the Dorena Genetic Resource Center in Cottage Grove, OR for 22 years.
Through all of that time, she was a constant part-time doodler and artist, painting in tempera, doing woodcuts, linocuts, and silk screen printing, operating a small teeshirt design and printing business, and designing graphics for various businesses and organizations, including the government of Bolivia and USAID and the Forest Service.
Jude’s painting genres range from “mythic realism” to pixelated landscapes and faces, exploring the meeting point between pure color perception and recognizable nature. She has a large interest in the geometry and rhythm of athletics, in the universality and uniqueness of human faces, and in the connections between different cultures and times, and is greatly influenced by ancient and tribal arts and textiles as inherent and vital in the human experience. She is currently experimenting with a textile genre in which face photographs are pixelated and then transformed into sewn “face quilt” fiber pieces, as well as continuing with oil painting and graphics work . Much of Jude’s painting and drawing work is for sale by inquiry. She is also available for contract work in graphics design for posters, logos, and teeshirts.