About the Art on My Site
Julie Davis was born in 1983 in Portland, Oregon. She studied art from the age of 15 at The Pacific Northwest College of Art, The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and also spent time studying art history, and painting in Italy.
Davis received her B.A. degree from Portland State University in 2007 and went on to receive her M.F.A degree in Painting from The New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in 2009.
Since her first solo show in 2003, Davis’ work has been exhibited in solo, duo, and group shows throughout the United States and her artwork is in collections around the world.
You can follow her at:
Artist’s Statement
As a visual artist, I record with and within the life of forms. I work toward greater fluency in the language of morphology, plasticity and beauty. Through my work I am gaining a greater understanding of my material, of seeing, and of the meaning of life. I am concerned primarily with the totality of each piece (be it solitary, diptych, triptych or otherwise) with respect to an intrinsic rightness and interconnected beauty. I consider everything I do, think and feel to be an abstraction of some kind. The uniqueness of the abstraction is what makes it mine. So, my work is abstract but I consider every work of art to be so. Therefore, my paintings and drawings are abstractions of something and something to be abstracted from.
I love mystery and dreaming because I love to be in a place that is generally mysterious with lots of unknowns. I love places that are greater than preset systems and formulas. I think I simply just like it when I and others can’t have all the answers. I like to question things and I think its really cool that dreaming is generally a safe place to people have where stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense. And yet I also feel that dreams, like paintings, are where things make more sense to me.
Like Picasso, I am interested in taking my work as far as possible without it falling apart. I like to resolve pieces that have fallen apart in fresh new ways. I love to work from a model in the landscape and in interior spaces. I consider the figure to be a reflection of my psyche as well as a reflection of my relationship with humanity. It also reflects the model and my relationship with the model. I think the figure is a parallel to me and that my work is, as Cezanne said, a parallel to nature. I think great art and great music, like life, are dreamy, mythical, symbolic, and poetic. I like that art can also be playful, humorous, and often contradictory. I love how things that might not seemingly go together, can actually morph together to form some sort of poetic rightness, some form of truth or revelation or Beauty.
