Judith is known for her images of trains but her life is hardly a singular. She liked to draw as a child but took a more academic approach to education and ended up working in television journalism. She was an onsite reporter in Nashville covering a lot of courtroom stuff when she started getting tired of that field. “I took a pottery class and the LSAT and I thought, ‘If I don’t get into Vanderbuilt Law School I would do pottery’,” she says. She passed and came to Richmond to work at a local law firm and then in the Attorney General’s office but she felt like something was missing. She began taking art classes at the VMFA and the Visual Arts Center and soon began seriously painting.       

                                                                                                                                               

      Judith Anderson, Stripes, 10x13, $225

As someone who likes to travel to unusual destinations, Anderson has been to China five times and several times to India. “I was an exchange student in Philippines which whetted my appetite for unusual travel,” says she. From mid-January through February she and her husband make an annual junket Oaxaca, Mexico, where she likes to paint her surroundings en plein air. The Bed and Breakfast where they stay is also a dog rescue center which has affected profoundly affected Anderson’s private life. “We brought two dogs home from there and have set up a nonprofit called, Friends of Meghan Rescue, to support the dog rescue operation,” she says.

Travels to Uyuni, Bolivia have inspired her most recent group of train paintings. “There is a fascinating train graveyard there with trains from 1900 to 1910 deposited in a high salt flat area at about 1400 ft elevation,” she explains. “I am working on a series of paintings of these train skeletons that are rather deteriorated and graffitied.”