Wicked Lemonade, November, 2011 Bromfield Gallery, Boston

I grew up in deep LA suburbia with a pile of kids on a dead end street. We had week long make believe marathons which included, but were not limited to; making adobe bricks, playing princes, princesses, cowboys and Indians, trading for toys on our front lawns, digging up fossils, and mixing wicked lemonade* for the boys next door. Let’s just say that I had a serious fantasy life.

And there was my father, a larger than life transplanted easterner who found the weather wonderful, could never learn to love the pancake breakfasts, and couldn’t shake the conviction that he was missing something in the wider world. But he was a great lover of art, and art there was in abundance, so at an early age, he introduced me to the Blaue Reiter, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, Navajo weaving, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and to many artists who chose to make Southern California home in the 60's and 70's.

Different sorts of immersions, but young minds do not have to parse meaning as much as they are meant to absorb living, and decades later I find myself circling back to my early life in Los Angeles.

These line paintings owe as much to those artists as it does to my afternoons mixing mud pies and making wicked lemonade with my friends. Paint has more reach than mud (or lemons) but using it feels familiar, especially as the process involves mixing, adding, obliterating, subtracting, and otherwise attacking layer upon layer of paint. In a way, I am concocting a potion.

There is also a formal side to the work, and the challenge for me is how to work the colors, the layers and the line, the deep space and flat, until I have a resolution that works for each piece. I am going for an odd tension- a solution that works formally, yet also resonates so that the pieces are felt, alive, and evocative.

Each paint surface has a minimum of six layers of gesso, acrylic medium, and rice paper or muslin on panel before I begin painting. The subsequent process involves both removal and addition of paint and medium so that a finished piece often has up to twenty layers of paint embedded in its surface.

julieweiman.com

*Wicked lemonade was made from lemons from our lemon tree, sticks, dirt, leaves, grass, and  anything else we could find in the backyard.