Jude Askey-Brown is a Kent-based artist whose richly layered oil paintings celebrate the beauty of everyday life, the changing seasons and the powerful connections between objects, places and memory.
Working from her studio at Godinton House, Jude finds inspiration in the gardens surrounding her and the familiar treasures of domestic life. A favourite cup, a vase of flowers, a collection of terracotta pots or a fragment of vintage fabric can become the starting point for a painting. These seemingly ordinary objects often carry deeply personal associations, recalling family relationships, childhood experiences and the comforting familiarity of home.
Her creative process begins with close observation, producing numerous sketches, studies and photographs before developing larger paintings that draw increasingly on memory and instinct. Working predominantly in oils, Jude delights in the physical qualities of paint, from the translucent warmth of burnt sienna to the buttery richness of yellow ochre. Using brushes, rags and scrapers, she builds expressive, textured surfaces in which earlier layers remain partially visible, suggesting the passage of time and the shifting nature of recollection.
Her latest collection is particularly influenced by memories of her grandfather’s cottage, where every windowsill was crowded with overwintering geraniums, cuttings and ageing terracotta pots. Tangled hydrangeas, woody stems, dried leaves and the first bright green shoots of spring evoke the sights and scents of those cherished gardens. These details, remembered as much through feeling as observation, become recurring motifs in her work.
Jude’s paintings are not simply representations of flowers or familiar possessions. They are reflections on the relationships we form with the objects around us and the memories they preserve. Through expressive mark-making, subtle colour and richly worked surfaces, she captures the quiet poetry of ordinary things, inviting us to recognise beauty in the familiar and significance in the everyday.