Residence

Seattle, Wa, USA

Place of Birth

Seattle, Wa, USA

Personal Statement

My paintings are lines layered and amassed into a landscape. They explore a relationship between the viewer and an environment. The landscape and how we view it places us, tells us who we are.

The act of painting tells a story and covers it up. There is a multiplicity at the painting’s surface, a this in conjunction with that. Two prevailing metaphors for me are the woven surface and the surface of water. Both bring seemingly opposing forces together – integrating these forces but not subsuming them.

Color in my drawing and painting is an element of line like velocity and direction. Currently my work is an open-ended contemplation of blue, particularly aqua blues and turquoise. I am contemplating the cool end of blue as water with its fluidity, its uncertain, layered depths and currents, and its surface as it interacts with air; blue as a healing color associated with the 5th chakra; and blue edging to green, as the ground in Cy Twombly’s 2003 paintings “A gathering of time”.

My work is in dialogue with Pat Steir whose methodology and materials produce visual events without representation, Brice Marden’s emotional color and repetitive intent, Peter Millet and his organic geometry which includes a persistent woven impulse, and Lauri Chambers, whose commitment to non-referential work insists on an involved viewer. I place myself in a lineage of artists whose work is contemplative with a simple and direct approach to materials, whose internal logic places the viewer’s whole self in relation to the art. Where the viewer and the art both inform and reflect each other.

Artist's Website

www.juliealexanderart.com