Local artist Linda Page Hudgins is showing her new work at The Depot, 22 Depot Street, in Tryon, NC through March 21.
Hudgins’ work strives to establish a nonverbal conversation between the painting, herself and the viewer. She explains her approach to painting as “abstraction overcoming distraction,” that is, the disruptions to consciousness produced when nameable objects focus thought too narrowly. In the absence of verbal distraction, painter and viewer are enmeshed in joyous emotional, physical and spiritual responses engendered by color, movement, shape and line, which Hudgins considers to be the finished language of painting. I don’t understand this. It is not for me all but dominant just for me.
On a return trip to China, where she had lived for three years, Hudgins realized that what she was painting was very different from the work she had done before her first period of residence there. She observed that being in China again was inspiring visions of color and movement everywhere she turned. Recognizing that her work records reflections on all of her life experiences, she understood how earlier impressions of China were expressing themselves in her current paintings. Now she trusts that sense of place to manifest itself wherever she happens to live.
Hudgins acquired her academic training during the 1960s at Converse College, where she worked with August Cook, who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy. In the 1970s, Hudgins earned an MAE degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, and spent a summer studying painting at New York University. Although she had experimented with abstraction before, she considers that summer in New York to be the turning point from verbal to nonverbal painting.
Having exhibited in Chicago, New York, Botswana, China, as well as a large number of galleries in the Southeastern United States, Hudgins currently has work featured in “Abstract Invitational” at the Spartanburg Art Museum, in “Cats” at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, as well as in “Roots,” an exhibition with the Women’s Caucus for Art in Atlanta, GA.
The public is invited to a reception for the artist at The Depot on March 14 from 4 – 6 p.m.

– article submitted by
Linda Hudgins