“Pieces of Color”
Sixty years later, Judi Betts still paints what inspires her, but with more color
At eighty-seven years old, watercolorist Judi Betts works amidst what she calls “a creative mess,” punctuated by eclectic interiors featuring a dining room where each chair is upholstered differently, a sofa that is seven different colors, and countless art objects hanging from the ceiling. In her upstairs studio, the news drolls on in the background from a television behind her, and over the balcony she can see into the kitchen downstairs—so as to keep an eye, and a nose, on anything she might be cooking while she works. She’s surrounded by the sorts of odds and ends that some might consider clutter, but she calls her “treasures,” and fodder for ideas. This is how she “lives a painting,” she says. “If you don’t exist and dress and act and admire things the same way you create, then you aren’t being true to yourself.”
Across the course of her remarkable career, Betts’s defining motifs have changed little. She was painting cattle in pastures as early as the 1970s, and in early November 2023 her drawing board was full of photographs of heifers to inspire a new commissioned piece. After all this time, she continues to be charmed by tableaux of boats on the water, farm animals gazing out from their fields, historic homes obscured by lacy branches, and rocking chairs on front porches in the summer. But as in life, no two paintings are the same; and as the harbors and the pastures and the neighborhoods undergo the subtleties of daily change, so too has the process of this master artist.
“If you don’t exist and dress and act and admire things the same way you create, then you aren’t being true to yourself.” —Judi Betts
Selections from Betts’s body of work, spanning sixty years, are on display through the end of the year in a groundbreaking retrospective at the Manship Gallery in Baton Rouge, where the artist has lived and worked since 1959. Sourced mostly from private collections across the country, many of the paintings included arrived at Betts’s home weeks before the installation. Many of them she hadn’t seen in decades. “I didn’t know how I’d react when I saw them all at one time,” she said. “When we opened it all up, it was like opening a photograph album from the past. I almost wanted to use words like ‘Oh, you’re so cute.’ It was very emotional.”
Many of the earliest works in the show represent the period of Betts’s life when the Chicago native first moved to Baton Rouge, following her husband Tom’s work. “Out to Sea,” (early 1960s) for instance, depicts fishing boats cradled by coastline waves, and earned Betts some of her first official acclaim here in the South. Since then, she’s received countless accolades here in Louisiana, including a commission by Senator Russell Long in 1998, and the Governor’s Award for Professional Artists in 2000. She was the first art teacher hired in Ascension Parish public schools, where she taught high school art for twenty-five years. During that time, she also completed a masters in education at LSU and some postgraduate work in art at Brigham Young and Southern Oregon State College.
All the while, she kept up her studio practice—gathering scenes that captivated her in a sketchbook, and occasionally using a camera, before going home to recreate the moment in watercolor. “I was so fascinated with how light and shadow interact here in the South,” she said. “I like the architecture of the houses here, and the patterns of sunlight on a porch.” Over the years, she’s returned specifically to painting chairs on porches—often empty ones. “It has to do with the shadows. I’d rather do, say, a wicker chair with a lot of undulations than a straight rocker.”
“I was so fascinated with how light and shadow interact here in the South...I like the architecture of the houses here, and the patterns of sunlight on a porch.” —Judi Betts
When it comes to her subject matter, Betts says she’s always approached it intuitively. “It has to do with where I am at that time, and things I have an affinity for. I just see things that I want to paint and gather information. It has to evoke a strong emotion.” Betts’s farm animals, for instance—chickens pecking the ground at Madewood and cattle gathered round the trough at a farm in Burnside—remind her of her childhood, visiting her family’s dairy farm. Boats continue to capture her imagination after frequently accompanying Tom, who worked for Cargo Carriers, to the shipyards over the course of their marriage.
Many of Betts’s paintings emerge from the wonder of traveling to new places. During the summers while she was teaching, Tom would frequently surprise her with plane tickets to attend artist workshops, where she worked with masters of the California School of Watercolor including Barse Miller, Rex Brandt, Millard Sheets, Milford Zornes, Chen KneeChee, and Dong Kingman. As her work continued to gain attention and awards, organizations started requesting for her to teach watercolor workshops. To date, she’s taught over five hundred courses all across the world, including in every state in the United States except for South Dakota and Delaware. She’s traveled extensively to show her work as well, participating in exhibitions and competitions across the world with the National Academy of Design, Butler Institute, National Arts Club, American Watercolor Society, Societe Canadienne de l’aquarelle, the Federation of Canadian Artists, and others. She’s also served as a juror for over one hundred competitions with the American Watercolor Society, Watercolor West, Pikes Peak International, and Artist’s Magazine’s international competition. The worlds of her travels have often made their way onto Betts’s canvases, such as in her paintings depicting the steady coordination of ranch life or concentrated energy of Mexican markets. “When I see these things that interest me,” she said, “I just stare at them. My husband used to tell me to stop staring. But what I’m doing is looking hard at something, drawing it in my mind, gathering information.”
Though she travels less these days, Betts still sees potential for creation in all the world around her—especially in the colors. When asked to describe how she believes her paintings have changed over these sixty years, she points to this. “Watercolor tends to be timid, and some people think watercolor is thin and delicate,” she explained. “I used to do more what we call ‘local color’—green trees, gray shadows. But I have increased the amount of paint I use, and added more layers of paint, the way you do with other media like oil or acrylic. I invent more, and play with my ‘pieces of color’.”
These ‘pieces of color’— or ‘sparkles,’ as she sometimes calls them—have come to be Betts’s signature mark in a sense: abstract dapplings of colored light that infuse traditional compositions of scenery with something more alive, more spirited. “But see, that’s what I see,” she explained. “For instance, I was looking out the window this morning, and seeing how much more yellow some of the trees are today. Those trees had been green, but now—some of it’s from the drought, and some of it’s just fall. But it would be boring for me to make a tree just green. I see so much more. A red cardinal in the tree. Blue skies through its holes.” Sparkles.
The Judi Betts Retrospective can be viewed at the Gallery at the Manship Theatre through December 31. Details at manshiptheatre.org and judibettsaws.com.