Julianne Durkin

     In the tradition of automatic surrealism and abstract expressionism, my work depicts an abstracted world that parodies both everything and nothing. I am able to accomplish this through gestural line and botanical forms, which I find inviting and infinite because they are simplified forms of life, abstracted to the most basic cellular level.  I gravitate to abstraction partly due to the communal experience and how viewers make independent connections to the same visual elements. They identify aspects of their own lives, creating their own individual world trying to decipher the visual language I created with paint.

     When I paint, and when I look at a painting, I want to fully immerse myself into the space. As I physically interact with my paintings, I leave a visual choreograph for the viewer’s and my own eyes. The marks I make, guided by composition, are rhythmic and repetitive yet varied. They sway back and forth through the painted atmosphere, forward, backward, and around.

     I view my paintings as illusionistic, not realistic, dimensions, or measures of special extent. They are my impressions of ultimate unity of immense cycles, of ecosystems within environments, of worlds within worlds, but they are not limited. The imagery is broad and generalized in concept yet complex in detail. This is not that tree and this is not that scene, we’ve never been here before but we are a part of it all.

     Aspects that seem to qualify success in a painting, such as balance, are comparable to Earth’s systems. Each mark is a reaction to a prior made mark. I am guided by rhythm and balance with an ultimate goal of congruity. In fact, weather is simply a transference of energy which balances Earth’s imbalances. There is always a bigger picture, or a more detailed concept that is not obviously apparent or understood.