Dear supporters, friends, and family,
Thank you for taking the time to look through this booklet that I have put together to show some of the work that I’ve done in the last year and a half, since changing careers to engage my interests in developing artwork of things that I find beautiful and inspiring. It has taken some time to come to grips with a new career path (not helped by the ongoing recovery from being hit by a car in May 2007), but the range of possibilities that awaits me is very exciting. In these last 18 months, I have started to explore a few themes and I am looking forward to expanding those with more and larger works.
I have been inspired by beautiful things. Some of these are works of nature - fossils, skeletons, and living animals. Others display our potential to create things of great craftsmanship and beauty - cathedrals, castles, lamps. Drawing all these objects helps me to see them in a different way, and each of them generates currents of dreams, thoughts and reflections.
I find drawing fossils particularly thought provoking. One of the great challenges that we face is the rapid change in climate that we are causing. We are and will continue to cause the extinction of many organisms, with the potential to eliminate ourselves in the process. I am hopeful that we will be provoked into serious action and that our intellect will be enough to dodge this danger. But other great and fearsome animals that ruled the earth in the past went extinct – albeit not through their own efforts. Their skeletons are a good reminder to me that apparently powerful things can go extinct.
I’ve done three drawings of dinosaurs in the past year –
shown on the cover and as you turn to the next page; the skeletons themselves 
are on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, but if you always wanted a dinosaur and didn’t have the space… originals of two of the drawings are still available, as well as reproduction greeting cards and posters (here).I love the detail and craftsmanship in old carvings and stonework.
Trevi Fountain in Rome is amazing in its entirety, but I found that spending time to look at the detail was very rewarding. Old stone castles – 
Edinburgh, in Scotland, and the tower in Vernazza, in Cinque Terre, Italy – were ones that I saw in the last year. 
They have so much detail to them, which I have tried to portray, both in the small drawings themselves, but also by looking closely at the gargoyles. 
I have many more images that I would like to draw from both places, but I would also love to go and spend some time drawing other castles. A friend gave me a great book on castles as viewed from the air last year for Christmas – some of those are on my list of places to visit. 
Places and objects of religious significance, whether old stone churches and cathedrals in Europe, or Shinto temples in Japan (I haven’t drawn any of those, yet), or Aztec, Mayan, or Incan relics, are often great examples of craftsmanship. I was impressed by the gargoyles towards the top of the tower of the cathedral in Bern, Switzerland (you have to peek out the archways of the narrow steps as you climb the bell tower). St. Jude’s church, which is near my sister’s apartment in London, intrigued me partly because the stonework on the steeple is slowly degrading. 
I find it particularly poignant when beautiful buildings are falling down for lack of recent upkeep, given the amount of effort their creation took in the first place. On a lighter note, I stumbled across a statue of rabbit in a niche over the entryway of a friend’s house. 
The entryway looked like the entry to a temple for the worship of rabbit gods. I then discovered that actually, rabbits were worshipped by the Aztecs. They had 400 rabbit gods, for these are the gods of drunkenness; according to Aztec mythology the rabbits gathered together for divine parties. God #2 is the leader. (God #5 is the god of hangovers - he may be receiving much worship during the holidays.)There is also great craftsmanship in lighthouses; they are an impressive combination of strength, utility, and elegance.
Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, in Bermuda, is visible from almost the entire island (and its light is easily visible from the ocean all around). It’s a great example of a hugely tall lighthouse that was only possible after the transition from stone to cast iron. I enjoy watching the path of light sweeping out from a lighthouse, especially on a slightly humid night; I tried to capture some of the feeling of the beam of light approaching in my drawing. New England lighthouses are often squat, stone constructions. The one at Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island is made of sandstone blocks, has a beautiful iron railing, and the multi-pane windows around the lamp were nicely challenging to draw.
I am also (obviously) intrigued by animals. Whether it is the beauty of the Golden Lion Tamarin
(and they almost always give birth to twins, how cool is that?) – coupled with the sadness of its imminent extinction – there are only about 500 to 1000 left in the wild, 
whether it is trying to capture the dappled coloring and the sunlight reflecting off the backs of deer, or whether it is trying to get across in a two dimensional static drawing the different characters that different bird species have, there is so much potential for beauty. 
For anyone who doesn’t have a cat, I would highly encourage them to put up a bird feeder where they can see it from a window. Watching birds and seeing the different methods they use to approach the feeder, to feed, and how they watch for predators, is immensely satisfying and endlessly entertaining.
As I write this, I realize that one theme that I have been exploring with my work is the combination of strength with gracefulness.
Whether that is displayed in a corner of a building, the curves of bone in a dinosaur, or the porcupine fish that I drew in the aquarium at my gym: he looks so happy, cute, friendly, and peaceful as he floats around, but he is an aggressive predator with a great set of spines – I find it intriguing. I think that we are at our best when we create things of beauty from otherwise dull and cold materials. One of the features of wrought iron that makes it so interesting is that there is great effort (indeed, part of the point is) to make the work look elegant and light. I think that the lamp I drew in Charleston, South Carolina has that quality; the shadows from the angle of the sun were just an added plus. 
If you are interested in following my work as it progresses (or if you were interested in buying a piece, but it has already sold), I post new drawings online at: http://www.nicholasjudson.com. I have also recently started documenting some of my thoughts behind the artwork at: http://nicholasjudson.blogspot.com. For anyone who is interested, subscribing to the blog with a newsfeed aggregator will provide a convenient way to automatically see new work that I have finished.
Many thanks for supporting me in this endeavor -- whether that support has been moral, word of mouth, or financial, it is all greatly appreciated. Your financial support has been crucial to allow me to continue creating works that inspire me and, I hope, you. On the last pages of this booklet, there is a listing of the artwork that is still available for sale, along with the first set of reproductions that I have had made – greeting cards and posters. If you are interested in buying any of these items, you can either write back to me at my mailing address on the front of this letter, by email, call me on the phone, or place an order through my website: www.nicholasjudson.com/purchase.
If you like the work that you see here, but have something specific in mind that you don’t see represented, I also do commissioned work and would be happy to talk more.
Thank you for reading and have a great holiday season,
Nicholas
