Julie Evans statement | biography | links + press

Julie Evans is a New York City based artist, who obtained her MFA from Brooklyn College and her BFA from Syracuse University. She has been spending time in India on a regular basis since 1997, including eight months on a Fulbright Scholarship to research Indian miniature paintings. These traditional paintings, along with India's rich visual culture have been a continuing source of inspiration for Evans' work for the past 13 years.

Using many of the traditional materials and techniques of Indian miniatures and borrowing from their traditional representations of nature, Evans creates detailed, fluid works that combine Eastern, historical, figurative painting with Western Contemporary Abstraction. She explores the role ornamentation plays in both Indian life and art, and how scale, fine detail, and process play into that role.

Her most recent project, Cowdust, is a series of eight collaborative paintings on paper. It is the culmination of Evans' work related to Indian miniatures, and was done in Jaipur, India, with Ajay Sharma - a recognized master of miniature painting and close friend of Evans' for many years. For Cowdust, Evans and Sharma worked together taking turns painting on each piece in response to the other's addition. Working in this way, they arrived at paths they never would have found on their own, given their very different cultures, painting practices, and temperaments. This led to many fortuitous, as well as humorous visual collisions in the work, which Evans and Sharma embraced and emphasized, and which ultimately helped define the works themselves. As a result, Evans and Sharma found ways to bridge gaps and fuse opposites in a series of distinctive works that cross time, space and place.