Judith Ann Braun is a New York-based artist creating wonderful landscapes and abstract patterns using nothing but her fingers dipped in charcoal dust. Since 2003 she has been experimenting with a new artistic medium and a set of rules: abstraction, symmetry, and usually charcoal or graphite. Braun says that she often uses her both hands simultaneously to the extent of arms’ reach as this allows the inherent symmetry of the body to generate a gestural vocabulary of mark making. All of her works are intricate and bilaterally symmetrical, sometimes covering an entire wall. “Abstraction keeps the images free to be anything, while the symmetry resolves that fluidity into something, like liquid energy crystallizing,” she says. The crystal metaphor is also reflected in the carbon medium of graphite that, under heat and pressure, becomes a diamond. The details of her sweeping landscapes are also all perfectly symmetrical.
