Reviews:
"A prismatic and original vision."
— "Judith Stone: Work on Paper", Rocky Mountain News, Denver, CO
“Judith Stone’s pencil drawings contain anomalous liquid areas - drips and pools - that transform sections of the vertical and horizontal expanses. The incongruity is effective, particularly in ‘With an Axe, Out of Crystal’, ‘Blind eyes Could Blaze’, and ‘...Jerusalem’, where the walls take on charismatic and talismatic qualities. This is excellent, difficult work that’s not really very pretty, its surface precision and design notwithstanding. Indeed, for that reason, more of it and bigger would carry quite a punch.”
— “Judith Stone: Recent Drawings”, Baltimore Arts Newsletter, Baltimore, MD
“In the precise material world of Judith Stone...front-end loaders clear mountains of rubble and steel beams rust to the colors of the soil. The pictures point out what others don’t see: the minute detail in a manhole cover, the ruin of abandoned worksites.
Stone’s pieces employ a mix of graphite, conté, photographs, and tinted Plexiglas, with touches of sumi-é ink, gold powder, and Japanese paper. In one piece, a backhoe unearths unnatural images of pine trees washed in the color of blood. In another, an ajar man-hole cover reveals the gravestone of a native Romanian who died in Nagasaki in 1920. Still another contrasts the malleable grace of steel cables with the smooth stillness of pillars in Jeruselem’s Old City.
To add dimension to the final piece, Stone actually burns holes in her work, to form windows onto [camera images perceived through] tinted transparencies. The layers in her work evoke different levels of conscious seeing, from the immediate action of the machinery to the shadowy bits of memory and imaginings that tear at the edges.”
— “Landscapes Abloom in Steel and Grit”, Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, Lancaster, PA
“Judith Stone is an artist with a sure grip on the pencil, one that she wields confidently in a quest for the virtual sensuality that can emerge in the proper inflection of gray. In a work such as ‘Return II’, Stone’s obsessive renderings of thick rope, [juxtaposed] with a blurred, grainy photo of a stone protuberance, apparently an ancient mooring, the reality of drawing and the reality of photographs are paired, so that we ponder their respective qualities.
Indeed, the overall surface of the work becomes a kind of topography, the various paper edges and folds suggesting an art of plate tectonics. Though never sanctimonious or fundamentalist, Stone’s art...can be described as a felicitous return to artistic basics, such as composition, contrast, and balance.”
— “Cordes et Noeuds/ Ropes and Knots”, The Gazette, Montreal, Québec
“Judith Stone’s multi-dimensional, mixed media drawings literally and figuratively function on many levels. She presents intertwined, almost Baroque images composed in gradations of gray, with additional hues strategically placed in limited areas. Like the rusty reds of “Stronghold/Horseflesh”, these ancillary hues seem to dissolve into Stone’s rigorous draftsmanship. So too does the limited use of photographs.
In the large scale, vertical piece “horseflesh”, a black and white photograph of a horse’s head has been inserted into a cut-out area near the top of the image. This photo sets the scale of tonalities she uses in her rendering of pulled and knotted ropes, weathered posts, and a gracefully defined horse appearing in the larger piece. Stone’s symbolic vocabulary of rural and nautical allusions - ropes, pulleys, weathered wood - are like a recurring dream with archetypal content.”
— “Three Reign”, Seven Days, Burlington, VT