Sex
Timothy Cahill: Sooner or later I’m going to have to ask you this, so we might as well do it now, since we’re standing in front of a canvas [in the studio] with two naked women, one lying on her back, the other sitting in a tree with her legs spread.
Judith Linhares: (Laughs.) Yes. Right.
It’s hard in your work for the viewer to avoid a certain explicit frontal display of female sexuality. How does that enter into the meaning of your painting?
(Laughing.) Yes. Yeah . . . hmmm. Let’s see if I can answer that.
I can’t imagine you’ve never been asked that before.
No, I haven’t.
It’s so obvious.
No. Absolutely. I think it’s getting more exaggerated in my work.
This figure in the tree—there’s one like her at UAlbany, in your painting Waiting for Horsemen.
Yes. This piece is a continuation of that painting. They’re wild women, they’re out there in the woods. Feral. And they’re kind of reveling in it. It’s such a good question. I know there’s a better answer than I’m going to give you. I think they’re witches also. Witches are associated with being a little naughty and outside proper behavior.
Waiting for Horsemen made me think of the scene in “The Crucible”—well, it happens off-stage, but everything in the play hinges on it. The group of girls is caught in this ecstatic ceremony in the woods, which involves dancing and nudity and has very strong overtones of sexuality, and they’re accused of being witches. And this witchcraft—what the townspeople are really afraid of—seems to have as much to do with the sexuality as the magic.
Right. That’s great. I did an interview with Bomb where I talked about what I feel I inherited from my family. I don’t have a family picture where people aren’t in their bathing suits or on horseback or with a fishing rod. It’s like there’s some major fantasy going on about living in nature. And at the same time, there was this zealot religiosity—my great-great-grandfather was a singing Baptist preacher. I feel like I’m an inheritor of this tension between being really repressed and otherworldly, and being a pagan, basically...I had a chaotic childhood. There was a high tolerance for irrationality and creativity. I grew up in a very permissive environment. I like to say I was raised in the forest by baboons. I was left to my own devices, if the truth be known.
And now you’re painting women who are left to their own devices. If you think about it, all the women in your paintings are pretty self-absorbed. Each one of them is in her own world.