About
Raised in New York, Julia first discovered her passion for drawing and painting by taking elective art classes in school. Since majoring in Fine Arts at LaGuardia High School, she is now a senior studying Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, expected to graduate with a BFA in 2025.
For more information on Julia or her practice, please do not hesitate to fill out a contact form or reach out through social media & email.
I have been exploring the theme of ‘congregation,’ in both the literal religious sense from having grown up in the synagogue, as well as in the abstracted collective sense. Like humor, congregation takes on its own cadence in shared gestures, echoes of prayers, clinking of glasses, and the shuffle of cards.
Instilled in me through my family is a respect of their history, and the generations preceding me that have started their families in New York too. From census records, I’ve come to know the offhanded phrase “its a small world,” means a whole lot more.
All sets of my great-grandparents spoke Yiddish, but only a select slang trickled down to me - with most of them being differing terms for anxieties. It wasn’t until later I realized they weren’t common knowledge, but the innate understanding I grew to know became vital to the relational contexts within my work.
Reflecting on Hebrew School, I loved the singing (even if I only knew the phonetics), shofar contests, staring at the stained glass and orchestra, and the way we grabbed hands and danced in circles. Through that, I unknowingly adopted a magnifying glass in my continuous inventory, one tuned especially for crowds - the way that we organize ourselves physically, the shared mentality or lack thereof, and the rare bittersweet moments when two can agree to disagree.
Painting, for me, is both theatrical and chaotic — an exercise in making sense of paradoxes. Humor works through my me the way it wafted through my home growing up: a tool for character assessment, bridging people, softening truths, ultimately, to producing a smile. Spontaneity and premeditation are enemies in my painting, whose power would not exist without the other, and their feud creates a harmony fueled by conflict.
When I take a step back after hours on a piece, I find I’ve unknowingly created a traveling line between all these harmonious conflicts, the paths of the venn-diagram are laid out in all their conundrums; Natural and synthetic, instigative and content, warm and cold, secrecy and explicitness, absolutism and categorization, nostalgia and idealization, metaphors and prototypes of characters, contradictions and indecisiveness, humor and cynicism, and whimsicality and habituality.
Sincerely,
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