Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / MARCH 2023
Julia Rose Waters
USA
julia-rose-waters-art.square.site
About
I want to highlight the magic that is already present in
nature in order to bring people closer to the earth. I capture
dreamy, moody scenes inspired by wildlife, magical realism,
medievalism, natural objects & phenomena, and I often use
spiritual and folkloric representations. Influences from my
youth in the foggy, forested, mountainous Pacific Northwest
are frequent. My work has been described as poetic, totemic,
and ethereal.
My primary mediums are acrylic paint, pen and ink, marker,
watercolor, and some digital coloring. I have some experience
with design projects using Photoshop.
I had a previous career as a public library archivist in
Colorado, where I currently live in a rural town near the
Colorado Renaissance Festival grounds. A dream of mine
is to sell artwork at the Festival one of these summers. I’m
a music lover (especially metal!), a vegetarian, and I love to
cook. I travel with my partner as much as I can, although that
means I sometimes have to be apart from my Goblin/Boston/
Shihtzu mix dog and two cats.
Worldbuilding
Lately I've been searching for the threads that tie my art
together as a body of work and also redefining myself as an
artist. Just before leaving Colorado for Arteles, I stumbled on
a brain flash that I wanted to explore further. Looking at my
past and present work, I imagined a post-apocalyptic future
in which magic, beauty, and evolution are emphasized in the
absence of humanity. I had only vague notions of this story,
especially atmospheric impressions such as radioactive color,
sculptural bones, and subtly altered evolutionary processes.
The pressure-free environment and the mental space I found
during the Silence Awareness Existence residency allowed
me to explore storytelling and worldbuilding for the first time.
As a result, I produced several pieces which were conscious
snapshots of this imagined landscape, as opposed to the
instinctual approach my previous art has taken. In my favorite
paintings, ghost-like beings wander, traces of unidentified
rituals remain in forested landscapes, and animals have
undergone mysterious and subtle alterations due to the
mysterious past events that caused people to disappear. The
wintery Finnish landscape with its harsh beauty contributed
greatly to my process. I have some further ideas and in the
near future, I hope to continue fleshing out my story.