Recent Judith Trepp: Unitary Spiritual Reality

 

When I look at Judith's work, I tend to see them in terms of horizontal and vertical pressure or movement. The works from recent years often feature just two main elements, with one being a large curved shape that, to me, seems to me to be pressing or pushing against the other element, or area of the surface. There is often the suggestion of slow but steady movement. What this motion invokes for me is sense of nearly subliminal feeling. It's like how certain circumstances or episodes in our lives seem to be imbued with a single feeling or sense that is there, unspoken, indeed not even thought of in most cases. But it is there.

But there is another way of looking at the works. That is the way of what Judith once described to me as "seeing through." There's a German word for it that she used, you know one of those words that captures a compound meaning, but I don't have it at my mental fingertips. In my long consideration of her work, I've come to feel that this seeing through isn't to a physical horizon, though it might be, but to the spiritual or subconscious reality that undergirds and infuses and envelops physical reality. So when I view the piece here, the lower curved form becomes a holder or portal for seeing through to that other level. Fair enough. But what is interesting to me, if I continue to work with this, is that the other level and this level are essentially the same. Here, they are the same serene gray, with the bottom component differentiated only by texture and a lightening of color. And I think about how all of life, at all levels or in all dimensions, is of the same spiritual stuff. If there is life and consciousness, it must be unitary. When we manifest or incarnate as human, we don't stop inhabiting the spiritual world. No, what happens we experience more disturbances, more of the particular joy and suffering we know as life on this planet.