A NEW BEGINNING

It has always been about the light.

I was born from the light, from my mother Lucia.

I follow the light... It always catches my eye. 

 

It has been quite some time since I last blogged about my artwork. It seems like forever and a day. After my exhibition of my embroidered portraits, "Home as Hat - Flora as Fashion", at the end of 2019, Covid hit a few months later. In the 18 months of isolation that followed, I began to evaluate the trajectory of my creative pursuits. I have always seen myself as a fine art photographer but as I looked at the work I had created over the past decade, I could see that I was yearning to pursue something in a 3 dimensional form. For 34 years I worked primarily with the photographic medium, trying to add something special, something new to the lexicon that had come before me. But the medium felt oversaturated and repetitive. Inspiration had left me longing for something else...

During the last months of the 20th and into the first months of the 21st century,  I (along with the rest of the world), was at a turning point. A point when I began to shed my tightly held belief of being only a fine art photographer and allowed myself to just be, then eventually allowing myself to just see myself as an artist, a creative soul who has no other choice than to create and share those creations with others.

As I poured over the many books I have collected over the years during the two hours every day that wasn't waisted on commuting during Covid, I avidly read and reread books on art, on artists and scholars thinking about art, and on their practices. I devoured designer's and philosopher's insights into the psychology behind shapes and shadows, colors and light, space and depth. As a photographer, these were subjects that informed my creative output but I became excited all over again at the idea of applying this knowledge I had inside me onto three dimensional objects.

And so a new beginning started for me at the start of the new century. What has transformed into abstract relief forms has engulfed my imagination and lit a fire in my belly again. I wake up thinking about relationships forms have with each other. I see them in the every day. I dream in line. I've became so inspired by this new work that I reduced my work hours to 4 days a week, dedicating Wednesdays and Saturdays to my constructions. 

Synchronicities surround me and I observe and pay attention to them. I was serindipitously offered a chance to share an art studio at Keystone Art Space which has allowed me a chance to concentrate on my work, a dedicated space in which I can work with light in a different way. Abstract art exists in its own right, and although influenced by it, the work is not necessarily a mirror of reality. It is this inner reality that is bursting forth from my life experiences, of observations and applying this knowledge to shapes and shadows, colors and light, space and depth.

This Saturday, May 18th from 4-9pm will be my first open studio. I hope you can join me in celebrating this new work that has brought me back towards the light.

Julie Green

May 15, 2024