Julie AngelaTheresa
MFA ’10 Fine Arts Low-Residency
My work is about capturing objects and people in a moment of time. Not the time itself, there’s no reference to what is going on where the object or person exists. Backgrounds are either blank, empty, or abstract as to not place the subject matter in a specific time. Rather my aim is more to capture the age of the subject. When starting a new work I asked myself, “Is this a new object? Is it old? Has it been used before? Is it bright, new, and shiny? Or has it been worn down from many years of use?”
An image of a rusty, banged up hammer tells you that it’s been well used; however a drawing or painting of a hammer in a workshop tells you where it was used, while an image of a hammer placed in a worker’s hand tells you what it will be used for. But I only want to showcase the hammer as it is.
This lack of a traditional setting gives the viewer the freedom to place the objects in their own frame of reference. Do they bring up memories of when the viewer used a similar object? Or are they dreaming up a past that the object might have existed in? If my paintings were made by an author they would be short stories not novels, haikus not epic poems. Smaller, but not less important. Not less meaningful.
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Julie AngelaTheresa is an oil painter and art teacher at ActonArt in Acton, MA. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Boston Public Library, the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center. Her current paintings are inspired by her two children’s love of building, creating, and learning, and of unintentional messes and destruction.
