Judith Sparks
Self-taught American artist Judith Sparks creates art in a kaleidoscope of intense color variations and patterns. She was born with a rare, heightened color perception called tetrachromacy, which allows her to see roughly 100 times the color spectrum of the average human. Sparks’s brilliant paintings and mixed-media assemblages are informed by poetry, mythology, and Buddhism, yet they remain rooted in a more earthly realm, with recurring appearances by dogs, cats, and Pacific Northwest species and scenes. Although her studio is in Eugene, Oregon, Pyramid Lake, near her once-hometown of Reno, Nevada, is a favorite subject: “Pyramid is a place of a thousand unnamed subtle colors, ceaselessly changing.” Sparks’s works often have a talismanic presence, immediately discernible to fans of her art.