Julia Townsend

Lives and works in Edenton, North Carolina, USA

Artist statement

In 2024 I was focused on drawing. It’s immediate: no mixing, no clean up. I respond intuitively to the world’s injustices, working into and between the borders to find impractical complexities. I enjoy sorting, or blurring, the figures from the grounds. I am drawn to the machine imagery of Futurism and the contradictions of Cubist space, such as the work of Juan Gris and Stuart Davis. The digital age feels like a concealed Rube Goldberg-ian construction: a virtual labyrinth of click baits and passwords. Now in 2025 I love mixing paint again- oil, watercolor, gouache, etc. I am working with shaped canvases again and objects, creating visual metaphors that reflect current situations. Art (for me) is at its best when it makes me rethink something I thought I already understood.

Artwork

• Woke Up and Everything Had Changed, 2025. Oil on Canvas
• More and More Becomes Less and Less, 2024. Colored pencil, ink, acrylic, graphite, watercolor on paper and matboard
• Nucleus, 2024. Ink and colored pencil on paper
• Union Wages, 2024. Colored pencil, graphite, ink on paper and matboard
• Homage, 2024. Ink, graphite, colored pencil on acrylic ground on paper
• The Missing 'What', 2019. Oil, oil pastel on canvas
• Jig, 2024. Oil, emulsion, pastel on panel and board
• Brainswarming (Installation: 'Rotunda Gallery', Dubai, UAE)), 2016. ink, graphite, watercolor on paper; oil on shaped(hexagon) canvas
• PTSD, 2019. Gouache
• Do Not Come (What the VP Said), 2024. Colored pencil, ink, gouache, graphite, watercolor on paper
• 23 Faces, 2024. Colored pencil, ink on paper and matboard