Artist Statement
Within my paintings, the natural world curls, swells, and pulls itself apart, forming stages for symbolic acts. I move impishly through tumultuous landscapes, where slick, high chroma paint illuminates my notions of love, desire, and the conflicts they contain. Thermal light licks at creatures from my milieu, as they hunt, swallow, pollinate, and trample through my childhood garden. In other works, I find myself in conversation with Narcissus, Daphne, Eve, and the Serpent, metabolizing their mythological transformations alongside my lived experiences.
My feverish oil paintings explore the paradoxically linked feelings of intimacy and detachment that define interpersonal relationships and complex connections in the natural world. Gestures of intimacy, ferocity, and contemplation inquire into struggles within nature, and often within myself. Familial and romantic relationships and the raising and burying of animals populate my work. Moreover, my experiences in competitive judo and jiu jitsu over the past decade have produced critical insights into issues of gender, power, and expectation that animate my gesture and my imagery.
Through color, luminosity, and drawing, I explore light and movement. My recent work takes on a warm palette, where intense chroma extends from my feelings of emotional fervor, the sweaty nature of physical stress, and the contemporary temperature of our environment. I layer transparent passages of paint to preserve chroma intensity, and to allow light to pass through the thin paint film and bounce off the finely sanded white surface beneath it, animating the painted surface through luminosity. My process begins with drawing from imagination, and then develops with staging and enacting stories in my studio, my childhood garden, or the surrounding landscape. When I stage my paintings, I experiment with light and collected or homegrown organic props, often videoing myself performing gestures as a way to play and discover.
I translate the ambition, joy, and grief of these experiences into a metaphorical language whose light, composition, and color narrate personal mythology. Methodologically and linguistically, I paint to question lived experiences, literature, and art history, creating chimeras that offer tentative truths from enigmatic sources around and within me.
Bio
Julia Gould (b. 1999) is a Baltimore-based artist whose feverish oil paintings explore the intersections of intimacy, ferocity, and the natural world. Drawing from a decade in competitive judo and jiu-jitsu, Gould translates the physicality of grappling and the cycles of her childhood garden into a high-chroma, metaphorical language. Her slick, vibrant paintings utilize color, luminosity, and composition to metabolize her lived experiences alongside art history, literature, and the environment.
Gould earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2022, where she majored in painting and minored in printmaking. Her practice has been recognized and awarded by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the YoungArts Foundation, The National Society for Arts and Letters, and New American Paintings. Beyond exhibiting across the United States and abroad, she has furthered her artistic research through the Chautauqua Institution, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the NYC Crit Club Canopy Program. Gould has lectured in the Baltimore area and maintains an active exhibition record through various solo, invitational, and juried showcases. Gould will enter the Yale School of Art Painting and Printmaking program in the coming fall as an MFA candidate.
