Judy Willoughby - Painter

Judy Willoughby is a painter and printmaker who studied Fine Art at Birmingham, Leicester and Bristol Art Schools. She is a member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and regularly exhibits her work at the Bankside Gallery in London.

Her life is a combination of commissions, teaching and creating artwork. As well as producing paintings for buildings and exhibitions, Judy runs weekend workshops in creative writing and painting in conjunction with the writing tutor Briony Goffin.

She has an idiosyncratic style that expresses a visual narrative. Her work is influenced by a sense of curiosity and a quest for the unusual combined with a feeling for paint and printmaking. Ideas mostly come from journals and sketchbook scribbles.

The work has a descriptive quality that has been put to good use for a number of commissions to create specific paintings for a range of hotels such as The Ickworth in Suffolk, a former National Trust property and a number of private and public buildings.

She works in the haven of her old garden shed with no electricity or water. This is the only place where she feels really free. A sanctuary surrounded by squirrels and pigeons hopping on the roof and an inside full of spiders. She is happier there away from people, phone calls and letters piling up on the kitchen table enabling concentration and solitude.

One of her favourite things to do is to get away anywhere with a sketchbook and just draw. She treasures these vignettes of life and would be devastated to lose one of her journals because it is in these that she responds directly to what is around her without time for censure. They also provide a foundation on which to build ideas for paintings and prints.