About the Artist

Judith Greenleaf is a long time Northern California Coastal artist with a house and studio near the village of Mendocino, which is famous for its natural beauty and for its dedication to the arts.

In summer and fall, she works at her Little River studio, leads workshops for the prestigious Mendocino Art Center, and teaches for Santa Rosa Jr. College. Winter and spring find her at the southern tip of Baja California where she has created an art retreat center and conducts workshops in drawing and painting, watercolor, and figure drawing.

Greenleaf received her Masters degree from UCLA in painting, but could also have received degrees in sculpture, art history, and dance. Her expressive drawings and sculpture are based on the figure. Movement, transformation, and myth are her major themes. She is known for her powerful, expressive figure drawings in charcoal, pastel, ink and mixed media.

She has been working with clay for over 50 years, and is currently casting a series of small figurative works in bronze. She also creates garden sculpture in cast stone and teaches workshops in a technique that allows one to carve the 'stone' while it is still soft or mold it over an armature.

Her other source of imagery is the natural world; places she loves in Northern California and Baja. Her plein aire watercolors and oils celebrate the beauty of meadows and forests, rivers and coastal headlands, gardens and images derived from plants

Judith has been honored with one-person shows in the United States and in Mexico. She has been curator of sculpture at the Fort Bragg Center for the Arts, has been featured at the Los Cabos International Airport, and has won many awards for her work in juried shows. She shows internationally and has been represented by galleries in California, Arizona, and Mexico. Her work is in both private and public collections.

A dynamic and sensitive teacher, she has been teaching college classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history, presenting illustrated lectures on the arts, and leading workshops and art travel in the U.S., Europe, and Mexico since the 70s. Her work can always be seen at the Mendocino Art Center.

Artist's Statement

My work reflects the things I love best and that have always interested me. The beauty of nature and of the human body, movement and transformation, myth, history, and the unconscious as revealed by dreams and by the forms which evolve as I am working. I see art as a mythmaking process and a dialogue with the material. Forms and personas reveal themselves to me as I work.

When I paint, I work outdoors, reveling in the temperature, the breeze, the light, the movement, and the mood of the present moment, both nature¹s and mine. I love a process which is free, spontaneous, and allows a romance with color and the act of painting.

Check out the Workshops that are currently available.