Biography

Jude Rae was born and raised in Sydney and attended the Julian Ashton Arts School as a school student in the 1970’s. She studied Art History at the University of Sydney and undertook Post Graduate study at COFA in 1984. She holds an MA (Visual Arts) from Canterbury University (NZ) and has taught part time at tertiary level in both Australia and New Zealand for the last 25 years, most recently with the ANU in Canberra. Since 1990 Jude has been interested in still life painting which, despite its historically low status in the hierarchy of the arts, is the genre associated with both the “golden” age of 17thC Dutch painting and the rise of Modernism in the early 20th century. Her interest in this ancient genre, which she prefers to think of in contemporary practice as “object painting”, has led to her more recent engagement with portraiture. Jude’s work also reflects a long term interest in the philosophical ideas associated with phenomenology, in particular the writing of Maurice Merleau Ponty. She understands current interest in “object painting” as manifesting a need to question the way we understand and relate to the complexities and uncertainties of visual perception, as it is both experienced and expressed in contemporary culture.