Bio:
Julia Jensen divides her time between southern Vermont and Nantucket, and her oils reflect her deep connections to both regions. Her vibrant yet restrained palette and the quality of light in her paintings harken to the Skagen and Funen painters of her ancestral Danish homeland. Jensen’s oils are gestural, expressive, full of energy and motion. According to Art New England, “Julia Jensen is a landscape painter whose canvases border on the mystical . . . Jensen’s command of space is masterful, and the sky seems to be stretching into infinity.”
Julia’s paintings are featured in many private and public collections including the State of Vermont, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, and the University of Vermont Medical Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Kent Museum, the Brattleboro Museum, the Vermont Arts Council Spotlight Gallery, and many others. Several of her paintings are currently on display at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, via the Art in the Embassies program. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art New England, Artscope, Vermont Arts Guide, and on Vermont Public Radio.
Statement:
When I first began to paint I worked directly from life. I would paint plein air and in the colder months I would work in the studio using sketches and photographs. Through this early work I developed a vocabulary of landscape. At present I am not painting from life as much as I did earlier in my career. Now I work from memories and impressions.
As I paint I try to keep the surface open for as long as I can. I begin with brush stokes and color, turning the panel this way and that, allowing the painting to emerge. While I am referencing the physical world I am no longer trying to faithfully represent a specific time and place. I am more interested in evoking memory and impression.
These days I am guided by a more internal path which is expressed perfectly by this statement from George Inness: “The definition of art is to represent objects, not for themselves but in order to embody the echo they have placed on our soul.”