Dana here to introduce Julie Bovee, another artist in our Open Studios Series. Julie is a San Jose, California painter whose acrylic paintings are heavily influenced by nature having grown up in rural Michigan, surrounded by it. She moved to Silicon Valley and immediately fell in love with the local flora and fauna.
Her works are deep in texture and have a painterly, raw quality that’s intentional and mimics the outdoors that she loves. She says, “when you look at a pretty floral landscape, it’s pleasing to the eyes, but when you approach it up close, you won’t just find beautiful flowers, you’ll also see twigs, leaves, bugs, flower petals, and all sorts of other things.”
Julie tries to capture that diverse, raw quality of nature, simulating the experience both far and near. From a distance her paintings appear as beautiful flower meadows or other scenes – soothing and inviting. Upon closer inspection, you’ll see texture, depth and intriguing details peeking through the surface that she hopes will lead you to fill in the blanks with your own imagination. To achieve this goal, she uses unusual tools to apply her paint. She isn’t a big fan of brushes. “They’re useful,” she says, “but don’t provide the unpredictability that I want.” Julie uses cardboard, Q-tips, BBQ skewers, credit cards, and a variety of other items to apply her paint. These tools are impossible to control like a brush and give random, unexpected results. This adds interest and is more similar to nature. Nature isn’t predictable, and Julie doesn’t want her paintings to look predictable.
The ultimate goal of Julie’s art is to bring you into her world to pause for a moment and smile – it’s a small but powerful thing. Julie is a self-taught artist and has attended numerous workshops run by a variety of local artists in-person and online. Her geeky past includes a Master of Science in Computer Science degree and a business degree. She had her first solo art exhibition in 2019 and her art is currently showing in KALEID Gallery in downtown San Jose. Her art hangs in the homes of private collectors across the United States. She opens her studio by appointment at Visual Philosophy.
When she’s not painting, Julie can be found tending to her flowers and vegetables, learning about and expanding her California native landscape, and volunteering to foster and care for tiny neonatal kittens.
Check out Julie's website here and connect with her on Instagram here. If you want to check out her schedule for Open Studios you can see that here
