For Julie Weiman 2009 was a very difficult year.
"Enough happened to make me realize that plans just might be a fancy human construct.
I am an abstract painter who takes great pleasure in moving a pencil, pushing a brush, the simple act of mark making. None of which was going to cut it in 2009, and as it happened, the beginning of 2010. I do, however, tend to react to my environment.
So I chose stripes. Honestly, it was all I was capable of. Call it a stripe digression.
I went about calming myself down with a lot of paint and some arbitrary rules involving straight lines. I pared my options, limited my moves, and started to try on stripes.
In the beginning, this was a lot like entering a fancy store to try on an evening gown, or like being a spy, or going undercover. But then I crossed to the other side. It took a while until I realized that I loved this new wardrobe, this stripe identity. I wasn’t about to let it go until I got the better of it.
I was going for a lustrous surface with something fragile, a little bit ruined, and very much alive. Each paint surface has a minimum of six layers of acrylic medium, rice paper, and gesso before paint is applied. The subsequent process involves both adding and sanding the paint and media, each piece resulting in a multi-layered accumulation of paint and hand.
Sometimes a digression turns into a direction."
Julie Weiman’s mixed media stripe paintings were recently featured in a solo exhibition at the New Art Center in Newton.
Visit Julie's website
