Portrait by Jackie Alpers For Judith Bateman, the act of creating art is “pure joy.”

JUDITH BATEMAN CAPTURES THE SONORAN LANDSCAPE ON CANVAS AND SILK

Mountains touched by the sun shimmer this day with a pretty purplish hue. Judith Bateman has a fine view of these peaks from the home outside Tucson she shares with husband Jim, a retired airline pilot.

A painter since age 12, when her mother gave her a set of oils, the award-winning artist captures mountainscapes and other aspects of desert living in colorful, often stylized works of art. Flowers, too, become the subject of her painter’s eye and brush.

Bateman, raised in Ohio, graduated from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She perfected her craft and gained an appreciation for America’s West and Southwest during three decades spent in Texas, New Mexico and Nevada, as well as Arizona.

The results of that feeling—and Judith Bateman's talent—are vivid works, such as Entwined, a landscape with horses, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 48".

For many reasons, including the state’s natural beauty, Arizona is especially dear to her. “The Arizona desert is a great inspiration,” states Bateman. Using bold acrylic colors on canvas and vibrant dyes on swaths of silk, she re-creates in signature fashion the desert’s plants, horses and other wildlife, as well as those magnificent mountain settings.

“I only paint things I know,” the artist says. For example, she has a deep familiarity with wildlife, including coyotes, which appear in paintings and also as sculpted shaman representations. “I have an endearing spot in my heart for them,” Bateman says and chuckles at the memory of one in particular—“an old coyote that would come and sit in our yard for years, and you could talk to her.” Horses, too, are a recurrent theme. She has ridden since she was a child, when she had her own horse, and she raised horses on a small ranch when she lived in Nevada.

Judith Bateman paints Arizona’s historic Spanish missions in quick strokes of bold, imaginative color, as in Tumacácori, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 30".

Several of Bateman’s paintings hang on her home’s living and dining room walls. Many more examples of her artistry, including clay and fiber animal shaman sculptures—recent additions to her repertoire—are in progress in Bateman’s large garage-turned-studio. Upon entering these spaces, one experiences an exhilarating sense of stepping into a Technicolor movie and leaving the world of dull, muted tones behind.

In the studio, a painting of horses shows the group of steeds seemingly melting into each other, as if on a single plane; they appear in shades of gold and rust and in such astonishing colors as blue and green. Another work depicting a desert scene has a purple sky and hot-pink mountain peaks. There is no attempt at Realism in her art, Bateman comments, nor is there symbolism. “I’m not much on the metaphysical side. There are no hidden meanings. What you see is what you get.”

Ask her if she is particularly religious, and Bateman answers, “Painting the landscapes and creatures of the desert brings me as close to spirituality as I ever hope to be.”