"Burn and Paintbrush ," painting by Julia Schwadron Marianelli

Julia Schwadron Marianelli

Julia is a painter and faculty of the Fine Arts Department, and the Assistant Director for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Sierra Nevada University. Her paintings have been written about in multiple publications including The Brooklyn Rail, The Bangkok Post, and Contemporaryartdaily.com. She has shown her artwork across the country as well as internationally. She was a Visiting Professor of Painting and Artist in Residence at Chiang Mai University from 2010 - 2011, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Iowa from 2007-2009. She was a founding member of the “Matzo Files,” an artist flat file project inside Streit’s Matzo store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2004.

Julia received a Joan Mitchell fellowship in 2006. She completed her BA in Studio art at UC San Diego in 1998 and her MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2004.

She currently lives and works in South Lake Tahoe with her husband and two kids.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In my most recent body of work, “Trembling Grass / Vibrating Grass,” I use text phrases that function as titles to begin many of the paintings. These text fragments refer to both the natural environment and the human psyche. One painting, “Suppression Tactics” was conceived as I considered the wildfire conditions in the west alongside the systemic ways that information is kept from the people who need it most. The text matrix as the first layer is meant as a place holder for thought as well as a visual structure to organize the painting itself. In other paintings in the series, I imagined the landscape communicating directly through leaving its own organic mark versus translating it into text myself. In works such as “Bank Breach” and “Weed Impunity” I am painting on top of fabric that has been bundled dyed in advance with local plants, literally embedding the plants themselves into the cotton. I imagine the finished painting as a kind of conversation with the landscape.