Kelly Louise Judd creates creepy, Victorian-inspired, dark-fairy-tale-like paintings and sketches. Thin frail little figures with spindly limbs and dolorous faces peer out at us through the dull dust of age, perfectly framed in their strange, uncanny little portraits and frozen in time. They are entangled in their own massive coils of braided hair, floating in dark staged spaces, watering the mournful desolate landscape with widow’s tears, and lying fallen upon the earthen floor of enchanted or haunted woods. Figures with deer’s heads are either their handmaidens or eerie guardians. Crows, wolves, rabbits, owls, swans, and other creatures also have their places. Reminiscent of children’s illustrations for a bygone era, these dark, austere, compact works have a quiet sense of yesteryear’s tragedy, melodrama, malevolence, and strange, lovely otherworldliness.
