julie potter
Artist Statement
My art is personal because the piece is something that I have created. It is apart of me. I work mainly in oil paint, watercolor, and drawings. The oil paintings are realistic still-lifes with some added abstractions. My drawings went in the opposite direction of my paintings. While my paintings focus more on capturing the actual light, color and the subject matter, my drawings are purely conceptual based. I felt freer to change and abstract the color in these drawings. After I worked in pastels for a while, I moved onto watercolors. I enjoy the use of this paint because of how it marks and moves so fluidly. I found when I was working in the watercolor I would take more risks and could be more expressive with the colors. These small and intimate watercolors were primarily non-objective, and I think I enjoyed creating them the most.
The only way I can describe my work is by calling it transitional. That seems to me to be the best descriptive word as of right now. I feel like everything is in transition from one day to the next. My concepts behind my paintings were to render the still life tightly and make that the central focus. Then I would take elements out of the still life and abstract them with thicker, looser paint, and move them around the still life that I had already painted. I chose to do this for not only the compositional reasons, but also because it allowed me to develop two different styles of painting in one piece. That is why I called my work transitional. I am learning and moving, and in transition from one style to the next at any given point. My drawings were another transition in my art-making career. Since the drawings were more conceptually driven, I had to think about the process in a completely different way. I spent more time researching, and coming up with the ideas than I actually spent making most of the work. That is very different from my paintings where I would quickly set up the still life, and immediately dive into it. Most of the drawings have some sort of reference back the scientific world, because of my interest in the basic elements of things. I like the simple elements of form. I also like taking and understanding what an objects most basic components are and putting them together in a composition to create something else. I am also a very color driven person. I will stop along the side of the road to see all the colors in sunset and how they come together. I think that my strength in art is my color compositions. I look to nature for many of my color choices, because there already exists a harmony between those colors.
Currently, I am working away from the classroom more because I am teaching out in the schools systems. My influences are coming more from the outside art world and the children rather than from the art world at Murray State. I am really drawn to the simple geometry and color choices of Mark Rothko, and Van Gogh and Monet are always my favorite for their paint handeling. I am transitioning from student to teacher, and mentally this takes me to another place. I like where my art is going because I donít know where itís going, and that is the exciting part.