By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH – There’s a curious, even puzzling depth to most people.
It reaches beyond the physical harmony that makes life and art possible – and it makes Judy Catterton paint.
And paint, and paint, and paint.
Her many canvases are brushed thick with both acrylic and unsuspecting figures, their backs often turned to the viewer.
Catterton, 65, a lawyer, teacher, writer and cogitator, has reached a point in her life – from coming of age in the early 1960s and longing to make a difference, to excelling at computer programming when those machines were nearly as young as she, living in Europe, prosecuting and then defending the accused in courtrooms – where she now looks back at her introspective ease to paint and write and work to become what she always wanted to be.
A Renaissance woman.
But, first, those paintings, especially of bathers on the sand near Rehoboth Beach.
“You get to make up a story if you just look at their backs,” Catterton says, surrounded by her colorful work in the home that she shares with her husband, Ken, whose paintings also people the large house.
“Without faces it could be anybody.”
Perhaps.
But there are some faces you never forget. And, even if you can’t paint them, they inform much of what you express.
Thirteen years ago, she said goodbye to Flint Gregory Hunt, a convicted cop killer whom she had defended, and who was to be executed in a few days.
Six years earlier, Hunt, 20, high on PCP, had killed a police officer, after driving a stolen car into the dead-end Iron Alley in Baltimore. After the officer grabbed him and called him an expletive, Hunt turned and fired several bullets into him.
On the last day Catterton saw Hunt before he was executed, she apologized to him for failing, for not being able to save his life.
Hunt said there was nothing to be sorry about. He explained to her, she later wrote, “how his world had shrunk and how paradoxically as his world shrank, his vision of it had intensified.”
And he told her how she taught him compassion. “And then he said it. He said that I had given him his dignity as a human being.”
Like her paintings, says artist Linda Minkowski.
“She’s very interested in people and she can see the odd things around her, the human interest stuff,” Minkowski says. “She sees the small stories.”
Catterton took painting classes from Minkowski about six years ago at Wilmington University.
“She’s interesting, and her interest reflects on how interesting people find her work,” Minkowski says. “She was a lawyer – how cut and dry – and here she’s doing this very expressive stuff. It shows a breadth of her personality.”
Born in Richmond, Va., as Judy Leibowitz, her father was a chemist, patent office examiner and part-time artist. When the patent office moved to Washington D.C., the family moved to nearby Silver Springs, Md., where her father learned how to be an artist from Andrea de Zerega, an Italian immigrant artist who later taught at Catholic University and Marymount College.
Catterton drew with her father and brother when they went on weekend picnics. A couple of times she went with her father to de Zerega’s students’ Georgetown studio where she met the artist, and whom she describes as a “Zorba the Greek” character. On Saturdays, she and her brother took an art class at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Although Catterton’s grandparents emigrated from Russia, her father would tell her they came from Poland.
“It was the McCarthy era,” she explains, and any talk of Russia was simply out.
Even so, her grandmother told Catterton stories about growing up near Kiev and escaping Cossack-led pogroms.
A self-proclaimed tomboy, at 12 she says she was not permitted to swim in a community pool because someone noticed her Jewish name in a sign-in guest book, helping propel her toward activism.
While in high school, the 1960 Freedom Riders inspired her to second a motion at a student government meeting in support of the desegregation of public accommodations. That summer, she worked as a counselor at Camp Goodwill, a welfare camp for inner-city children.
When her hero, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in November of 1963, she went to Washington D.C. and stood in line in the cold to march through the Capitol rotunda .
Ready for college, she wasn’t sure what to do. Commercial artist? Microbiologist? The times were against her.
“Women either stayed home or taught or became a nurse or a secretary,” she recalls of her options.
She attended the University of Maryland and majored in English; she graduated with high honors in 1966.
She met Ken Catterton there, whom she married the same year. She substitute taught for a while when they settled in an apartment in Prince George County. She didn’t like the job. When her brother Stephen, who also had majored in English but who worked as a computer programmer, suggested she try it, she jumped at the chance.
She went to Honeywell and IBM school, learned how to write early programs such as COBAL, and became a programmer and systems analyst. She continued to draw, and one pen and ink drawing, of Medgar Evers’ wife – the picture of her grief-stricken face appeared in the Washington Post shortly after he died in June 1963 – she sold in 1969; years after she sold it, she thrilled to see it hanging in a dentist’s office.
By1969, however, both she and Ken had become disillusioned with the country, from the war in Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. With $5,000, they wandered Europe for seven months.
When they were forced to return because they ran out of money, Catterton’s father suggested law school.
“It struck me as a way I might become involved in some effort to help right the wrongs that we saw all around us,” she says.
And it appealed to that part of her that loved analysis and computers.
“Logical thinking is like computer analysis,” she says. “My father and I would have long conversations about language and logic.”
She and Ken, who attended architecture school, lived in her parents’ basement.
At Washington College of Law in American University, paid for mostly through scholarships, she volunteered to work on an FHA fraud investigation, and worked on a grant to study abuse in the Head Start program. She graduated in 1973, then made a move that stunned her activist friends.
She took a job as a prosecutor in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office in Maryland, the second woman ever to do so.
Why not the public defender’s office?
“A year as a student in court had shown me that a prosecutor had more power and more opportunity to effect social change,” she says.
Although she drew sketches and painted watercolors over the next two decades, she devoted herself to the law. She was in court when she went into labor in 1977. “It was exciting and I didn’t want to stop,” she said of her trial work, and gave birth shortly afterward – in a hospital – to her only child, Adam.
In 1982, she moved to a private law firm, where she practiced medical malpractice defense. She lasted 18 months; she missed the independence of being her own boss and the criminal trial work.
With friends from the state’s attorney’s office, she began her own partnership, Catterton, Kemp & Mason, in Rockville, where she practiced full-time until her move to Delaware in 2000.
In her law firm, she mostly defended accused criminals, from child molesters to rapists.
“I believe in due process, a fair trial, all the constitutional protections,” she says.
Even after her move to Rehoboth Beach, where Ken wanted to retire, she tried cases until 2007. By then, however, her love of painting and a new-found desire to write essays, took over.
With other students of Minkowski’s, she helped found the Delaware Shore Artists Group, and she joined the Rehoboth Art League. She has exhibited her work at Wilmington University, the St. Peter’s Art Fair in Lewes, Nassau Vineyards, and in several businesses.
“What I do like about her work,” Minkowski says, “is she can look through the eyes of a child, at a child’s height, and see what the child would see. She did a recent one of a little girl walking down the boardwalk – all these legs and behinds in front of her, this little girl catching up. Another artist might do it from the adult perspective. It adds to the charm of her work.”
For three years, beginning in 2004, Catterton and Ken have traveled to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, and painted everything they saw. These paintings, in contrast to her beach scenes, are darker. Catterton did a self-portrait of her sitting by a window in a restaurant there that, somehow, reveals a dark ambivalence.
“Letting go of the law is so hard because I had so much invested in it,” she says. “When you say you’re at the end of it, it’s very, very hard. It was an identity. Does the artist replace it?”
Even if she never discovers the answer, it will probably inform and make her work more powerful, says an old friend.
“Judy has an alive mind, and as long as she’s around, she’ll be this way,” says Ben Vaughan, a partner in a law firm in Maryland who knew Catterton for years as both a prosecutor and a defender. “She has to question everything. Every aspect of her life will be something she reevaluates. That’s Judy, part of having a mind that inquiring and that alive.”
Creativity, analysis, altruism, teaching – and all those puzzling themes that connect human beings.
“That’s what the art means,” Catterton says.