About
 
   Raised in New York, I first discovered my passion for drawing and painting by taking elective art classes in school. I majored in Fine Arts at LaGuardia High School and am now a junior studying Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, planning to graduate with a BFA in 2025.


  
 

For more information on me or my practice, please don’t hesitate to fill out a contact form or reach out to me through social media & email.


    I enjoy toying with the idea of a painting being performative both in methods of application and in subject matter. Like many other artists, my education began with the fundamentals of principles of design and composition. Once I felt confident in those, I sensed a newfound freedom in my painting and drawing that those structures were always inherently dormant, brewing in the back of my mind but not always meant to be the primary focus. Combined with my secret love affair for dance, I’m particularly keen on the ways that proportion, balance, and rhythm can enhance not just the arrangement of subjects, but also the harmonious act of spontaneously and premeditatively applying paint. Intuitive mark-making for me is thus a delicate recipe of both of these things, and I make sense of it as a parable for life’s mysteries; That all things natural and synthetic are pursuant of their own paths, simultaneously friendly and hostile to one another, all consuming and circulating. 


   I am interested in concocting a unique mixture of contemporary and provisional painting techniques with the romance and choreography of the Renaissance, Intimist, and Expressionist periods. I like to depict the battle between these polarizing categories in my work - between drama and subtlety, turbulent detail and calculated ambiguity, and pictorial sterility and fantastical atmosphere. I take inspiration from the seemingly monotonous settings yet all-encompassing emotive and figural qualities captured by Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, James Ensor, and Mary Cassatt. I am also fixated by the works of Robert Rauschenberg, Katherine Bradford, Jockum Nordstrom, Sigmar Polke, and Henry Darger, who take whimsicality and representational metaphors and gift-wrap them through hypnotic abstraction or graphic illustration.


   Most recently I’ve been exploring the theme of congregation, both in the literal religious sense from having grown up in synagogue, as well as in the abstracted collective sense. It collages moments and experiences together that transcend the individual into the intimate collective and mundane interactions into the ineffable. Congregation takes on a rhythm; the shared gestures, echoes of prayers, clinking of glasses, and the shuffle of cards. It’s an ebb-and-flow ballet that solidifies itself in memory and a string of narratives that constructs identity.


    Painting has become a puzzle for me to enthusiastically solve, and with authentic exuberance and intention, I hope to visualize my humorous voyeurism of the world.


Sincerely,




To read more writing, click here.



©2024 Julia Klugman