Born in Leicester in 1965, Jude moved with his Irish family to Dublin at age 12. He achieved the highest mark in his Art exam at Leaving Cert stage but chose to follow his love of music and began a 15 year career as a professional musician and composer based in Dublin. His band Mexican Pets released 3 albums and toured both here, the UK, and Europe. His work subsequently moved into composing soundtracks for many short films and TV including Paths to
Freedom and I Went Down.
Jude has always been attracted by abstraction and moved his career into art from music. Now a fulltime painter, and selftaught, he is based in County Donegal where he paints from his studio. In 2014 Jude showed his work for the first time at a local group show in Dunree fort Buncrana. He produced a body of work into 2015. These initial works were a series of 8 one metre square paintings in oil. They were inspired by and featured the song titles of music that he found influential. Using washes of colour and layers of form over form, slowly the figures appeared to which he
likens to the constructivist movement and a nod to the happy accident. Francis Bacon calls this technique his deliberate mistake.
Jude followed with larger scale works with abstract Portraiture in mind. His influences range from Basquiat and Bacon to Van Gogh and Matisse. In October 2015, Jude showed another work at a group show which was seen by the curator at the Warehouse Gallery Derry and was chosen out of the 90 artists showing to be represented by the gallery. He was offered a solo show in March 2016 which was well received and described by Culture NI magazine as powerful and honest.
