Julie T. Chapman

Julie is a Montana-based artist with an abiding love of the modern American west. She works primarily in paint and scratchboard; her mission is to share her wonder at the beauty and sentience of the animal nations with which we share this planet, and to connect others to Nature with her work.

Since 2010 she has been working predominantly in scratchboard and has been delighted to help pioneer its acceptance as a fine-art medium. Beginning in 2019, her painting process evolved into a ‘disrupted realism’ style, where her subjects are fragmented and the outcome of each piece is unknown at the start. The journey involves abstraction, drawing, scraping, and re-working — all in a search for “the right amount of not enough”.

The fragmented aspect of these paintings is her response to the chaos and intolerance that is everywhere in our environment - social, political, natural. Many of the paintings are intended to confront the viewer, to spur us to ask questions of ourselves and of each other.

The ‘incompleteness’ of her subjects also feels to her as if it is revealing something more elemental, more essential...perhaps reflecting her own deep emotion and love for the animals she paints. She states, “these pieces require a deep, wordless conversation; they demand more from me than any other body of work I have done before, and I frequently struggle with self-doubt in the process…yet each painting that works is deeply satisfying.”