Graduation! Updates!! New artist statement!
Hi everyone!! I just graduated from the University of Tennessee Knoxville with my BFA!! This semester has been full of so much growth and fun as a Senior!! I had a super successful weekend at the Dogwood Arts Festival and a great final Capstone show to end out the year! I also had the honor of being one of seven student chosen from the Art and Architecture program to be in the Honors exhibition showcase last week! Phew!! Its been a busy one and it does not stop here!!
Next steps!! I start my Masters program in Art Education this upcoming week and am continuing to complete commissions and print orders! I have been truly so humbled and honored by the love and support from so many incredible customers and people!! I am excited to keep this business going and to keep this website updated with my work and prints for sale!! The best way to reach me is on my instagram where I post regularly! @art_byjulia_7
My new and updated artist statement:
My work lives between the real and the imagined, pattern and nature, the past and the present, and beauty and sorrow. It exists in the space where idealized landscapes and the pattern in my skirt, happiest, sad, and quiet moments of my life conjoin. Through painting, I materialize these instances that would otherwise recede into abstraction.
Painting allows sadness to feel like a gift, a proof that something mattered. It transforms nostalgia into permanence and memory into something that feels whole.
I paint memories I cannot return to, making them tangible so they cannot disappear. I have always lived this way, in a suspension between longing and gratitude coupled with memory and anticipation.
Fear of Forgetting, is an attempt to hold on, to make something permanent out of what is fleeting. Painting allows me to hold these moments still. Pulling from childhood, travel, human connection, and the mundanity of everyday life, I translate experience into layered compositions filled with florals, repeated borders and patterns, decorative motifs, landscapes, and fragmented imagery. These function like a scrapbook, each detail intentional, reiterative, and reflective. I construct layered compositions that function as visual archives.
The tension between looseness and control in my painting mirrors my own contradictions: I live nostalgically in the past within my work, yet daily race toward the future. This urgency and concomitance appear in my compositions as crowded, patterned, alive with color and movement. Chaos and control exist side by side while loose gestures meet rigid borders. I am drawn to repurposed materials: thrifted frames, fabrics, and furniture, giving them new presence and memory. I am interested in giving objects another life, allowing them to carry new meaning layered over old histories.
Some paintings hold a single moment; others collapse many memories into one imagined place. Each work becomes somewhere you might want to be instead of where you are standing.
Influenced by the pattern and decoration movement, impressionistic color, and the visual chaos of my upbringing in a large expressive family, my paintings embrace fullness and a maximalist approach. I do not believe in blank walls. I want my work to live among postcards, notes, and photographs, something to be looked at every day. Through repetition, warmth, and color, I create spaces viewers can escape into and see themselves within. Ultimately, these function as sites of connection, where objects are meant to be lived with and remembered.
My capstone show!! (over 20 pieces- some not shown)
