Third Tree, oil on canvas, 36"x28", 2017
Julie Shapiro's "Location" exhibition of paintings will be in the gallery from June 16th - July 31st. The work is inspired by the geography that surrounds her, including our beautiful Berkshire landscape. We are so pleased to be showing her work and included in her impressive list of exhibitions and accomplishments. Please join us for an artist's reception on June 16th 5-6:30pm.
Artist's Statement
I work between two-dimensional media: printmaking, drawing, painting and collage. I am interested in the rapport that working between these mediums has encouraged and the reexamination of contemporary usage of these traditional materials and practices. Each media offers a different resistance, palette, surface and space.
Cutouts and collages as stencil forms and templates have become an essential tool in my working process. The use of these forms has been influenced by the printmaking process, the layering of color through multiple plates and the kind of decision this requires. Their use enters the work at different stages, along with freehand mark making with brush, pencil, eraser and rag. The literal layering and combining of the already made structure with the more reactive response encourages the reexamination and self-critique that is essential to my working method.
The work is strongly inspired by the geography that surrounds me, the variety of experiences and perceptual relationships are an intrinsic source to the work. I find in the landscape visual occurrences of the new within the familiar, the irregular within the regular, the unexpected within the assumed. Along with natural phenomena, the gathering of information and experience is broad and varied with parts and pieces entering the work in different ways.
Within the making of an individual work, there occurs a shift that separates, selects and asserts through an open-ended process of the experiential through materiality and formal constructs to resulting form. The consequence of the collisions of history, critique and my individual response are what trigger ideas and drive my practice.
Julie Shapiro