Artist Statement
Within my paintings, the natural world bends, expands, and pulls apart from itself, forming stages for symbolic acts. I move impishly through feverish landscapes, where slick, high chroma paint articulates scenes characterized by their luminosity. In some works, animals trample through my childhood garden. In other works, I find myself in conversation with Narcissus, Daphne, Eve, and the Serpent. These conversations serve as an investigation into my relationship with art history, the environment, and the people around me.
Thermal lighting is central to the work, citing landscapes that are unstable, and defining mood within key moments. In my work, ferocity and desiccation confront images of indulgence. I investigate the things we want, sometimes joyful and sometimes perverse. Repeating characters swallow, hunt, pollinate, and mimic their surroundings. Sultry florals, predation, intimate gestures, and other acts of indulgence inquire into the nature of my character, struggles against nature, and often against myself. My compositions often contain an irony or a contradiction between fantasy and reality, regarding the environment and interpersonal relationships. These moments reveal issues of character, by way of examining desires.
I work carefully, layering transparent passages of paint to preserve chroma intensity. This allows space for the luminous qualities of oil paint, which come from light passing through the paint and hitting the finely sanded white surface beneath it. This paint handling is drawn from printmaking and ink wash techniques, which often involve applying paint to the negative space, and allowing the white surface to provide light. My work starts in my sketchbook, drawing from imagination, and often develops with staging and enacting stories, in my studio and my childhood garden. I make the paintings from a combination of imagination, life, photographs, and video stills. By using my childhood garden as a set, and imagining familiar creatures in metaphorical acts, I find a home for my personal mythology.
I am informed by lived experiences, Platonic dialogues, art history, and the garden I grew up in. The symbolically laden scenes occupy the space between fantasy and reality, where I find a necessary discomfort in this inconclusive space. In some works, passages of romance confront implications of threat. In other works, I reference classical tropes through compositions skewed to highlight the peculiar nature of the fantasy’s enactment. Visions of attraction and temptation reveal themselves, and through careful construction of composition, I question their integrity.
Bio
Julia Gould (b. 1999) is an American artist living and working in Baltimore Maryland. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2022), where she majored in Painting, and minored in Printmaking.
Julia’s work has been exhibited and awarded by organizations such as the YoungArts Foundation in Miami, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Andrew Reed Gallery in Tribeca, T & Y Projects in Tokyo, Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, Gallery 263 in Cambridge, The National Society for Arts and Letters in Washington DC, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and New American Paintings. She has furthered her practice through intensive study with the New York City Crit Club Canopy Program, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Chautauqua Institute. In addition she has lectured in the Baltimore area along with exhibiting in solo and invitational, juried exhibitions.
