Julie Poulsen. Photo Michael Marzik

Julie Poulsen

artist statement

It is the everyday narratives that provide the starting point and word play that drives the momentum. Before heading to the studio to create, I write to confirm my thoughts. This literary honing simplifies and substantiates ideas paving the way for concentrated investigation.

Julie Poulsen Wine Menu 122 x 122cm (h)

For me unlike the self – judgement that occurs with capturing likeness in figurative work, landscape tolerates subjective permission of interpretation. It is this permission to rebel that keeps me probing for the unconventional when making figurative and portrait works.
2015 was my final year as educator at TAFE; it marked an interim transition from exterior and landscape to interior and figurative. This was the year for study of portraits and figures from life, a return to oils backed up with an intense revision of traditional functions.

My chosen subject matter is broad.
Landscape, namely the panoramas, will forever remain a feature of my art practice: It is the breadth and unruliness of the landscape not the intricate fussiness I am after. Perhaps it is the corner stone of my practice.

Julie Poulsen Wetlands #1 83 x 106cm (h)

No matter what there is always breadth and intimacy in my artworks: the detail is not for rendering reality but earmarking areas for closer consideration.

Julie Poulsen Wetlands #2 83 x 106cm (h)

2020 saw my return to text based works. Unlike the roadside street signs of 2005-2009, this new body of work will explore the haiku, each painted poem to sit alongside a favourite painting as an added label of meaning.
My other motivation in 2020 was to continue the cockeyed combines of assemblages, a mingling of collected objects, small ceramic pieces and canvases. Sometimes they speak a landscape language at other times tell personal interior stories.

Julie Poulsen Latte 110 x 130cm (h)

Invigorated with these observational skills in 2017 I returned to a long established love of mark making, mapping and drawing within the painting. The associated stories are personal and not without humour. They combine a new vibrant palette, a revised painting technique and the introduction of markers and biro drawing. The stories are real; the characters in the paintings are improvised, sometimes from quick sketches and dodgy photographs or pulled from my life drawing drawer and reinvented. Three separate figurative Stories were a result of this period: Beach Diary, The Card game, and Life class.

No matter what there is always breadth and intimacy in my artworks: the detail is not for rendering reality but earmarking areas for closer consideration.

Julie Poulsen Life Class 137 x 152cm (h)