31 Women – March 5th: Julia Jensen
It Simply Spills Over, 2019
Oil on panel
An Interview with Julia Jensen
MKM: Tell me about your childhood? Were you always creative?
JJ: I grew up outside of Boston in a big old New England house. One of my indelible memories is making a small drawing of a horse’s head; I was in second grade. My mother just loved the drawing, so much so that she made it into an embroidery design. I was very impressed by the fact that my mother was pleased and made such a fuss. From that moment on I was the artist in the family.
MKM: Where did you study?
JJ: Later in high school I moved away from art because it seemed like play and not something that one should pursue in any meaningful way. That attitude continued into college and I seriously thought I would be a math major. My sophomore year I discovered Art History. A dark room at the end of the day, it was like going to the movies and I loved it. Art history lead me back into painting and once again I discovered a very cool professor who was only a few years older than me. She introduced us to the art community in New Orleans, which at the time was not a city known for a very vibrant arts scene but underground there was a lot going on. We would take outings to galleries and her friends’ studios. It dawned on me that art could be a way of life, a living community. Unfortunately, since I was well into junior year, I didn’t have time to pull off a studio major. I graduated on time but with a degree in Art History.
After college I moved back to Boston and worked in galleries and took painting classes at the Museum School. Working in galleries was a great way to be fully immersed in the contemporary conversations around art. I was exposed to the very broad range of what was happening. There were many conversations, styles and interests.
MKM: Do you focus on a specific medium or combination of mediums?
JJ: I think like everyone, I experimented with different styles and mediums. But to really learn to use paint, [when I began painting], I needed to work with realism. I needed some kind of external measure. During this early time, I was interested in work by realist painters, Edward Manet, Andrew Wyeth and of course Georgia O’Keeffe. All of these artists were working in realism, but they seemed to be hinting at the influence of something just beyond the canvas, something unseen.
MKM: What themes do you pursue?
JJ: What I am most interested in exploring in my work is a sense of mystery. I am not bold enough to find my way into the mystery in a direct way. I have been on a path from observing the outside world and am finding myself now turning inward. I have this whole vocabulary that I have developed over time that references the landscapes around me. What I am striving to do is use those shapes and gestures to evoke mood, emotion, psychological space as opposed to actual spaces.
MKM: What art do you most identify with? What inspires you? Other artists, other women from history, your process, a theme?
JJ: I am drawn to painters who manage to find the threshold between representation and abstraction. I love expressive color held together in compositions that have some kind of resonance, response and perhaps resemblance to the world around me, Madeline Denaro, Eric Aho, Connie Hayes are a few of the painters I turn to again and again for inspiration.
MKM: Do you have a sense of connection to a particular woman artist from art history?
JJ: At the moment, I am utterly fascinated with Hilma af Klint and a number of previously ignored early 20th century women artists like Emma Kunz and Georgina Houghton. All of these painters worked by channeling disembodied spirits. They saw their work as art, but also perhaps more significantly as messages from an unseen source. They were completely dismissed by their peers, but what they were bringing forth were completely original responses to internal worlds.
It makes sense to me that women are the source for this kind of work and that it would happen outside of any kind of movement or officially sanctioned group. I think that since these women were ignored, they were completely free to follow their instinct and were able to be honest in the way only an outsider can be. Their work is iconoclastic and seems to be born in another time, before any abstract work was appearing anywhere by either men or women. It popped up out of nowhere and referenced nothing that had come before it.
At the risk of sounding grandiose, it is this deep connection to myself and perhaps even something beyond myself that I am trying to explore in my art. I don’t however want it to be a solitary exercise. I want to be able to connect with others through my paintings. So, I continue to include references to the external world to give others a path in. Using landscape as jumping off point also gives me a handrail into the process. I have tried to paint completely non-objectively and just find that I am at a loss, the process becomes arbitrary. I need to have some kind of structure and for the time being landscape is what is serving me.
