JULIE STAFFORD
MY ARTIST STATEMENT
My art allows me to look deeper into my observations and interpret them through photography and painting.
By sharing my artworks, I invite you to see and feel what touches my heart and makes my soul sing.
You have to let your emotions inform your art and photography to fully comprehend the meaning of what your eyes are recording ...
​
... My art is a result of my intense curiosity to know more about my physical and spiritual world. Through my writing, photography, and large-scale acrylic paintings, my inquisitiveness leads me to explore that which existing physics and mathematics cannot explain. For example, the concept of synchronicity fascinates me. I'm on a journey to discover what role synchronicity plays in my evolution. Through my art, I am attempting to come up with an explanation for the occurrence of highly improbable coincidences between events where there is no causal link, but there is meaning to me. Through my camera lens, I challenge myself to find the angle not so obvious and then work with multiple resources to distort, manipulate and change what I have captured to make unique art. Painting with acrylics offers me a different experience from what my camera and editing applications offer me. Using thick layers of vibrant acrylics, I aim to capture your attention and invite you into my unexpected and unexplainable experiences.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE STUDIO?
PAINTING
Currently, I'm working on a suite of acrylic paintings that tell small stories within the larger story of my memoir, 'Becoming Solo'. Trying to make sense of all the strange coincidences that collided after my husband’s passing, I wanted to pay homage to the seagulls that opened my eyes to a world beyond where I existed.
Though it would be easy to assume my story began just days after my husband’s passing, when I discovered a disoriented seagull on my beach house balcony, it could just as easily have started on the terrace of a villa in Santorini when a seagull captured my attention for reasons I couldn’t explain then, and still can’t today. Or perhaps my story began in a taxi, when the driver, Rahul, shared a touching story his mother told him about why thousands of seagulls fly low over the holy Ganges River.
Inspired by the stories in my art I hope others who have experienced coincidences just too coincidental to consider them random events will feel inspired to share their stories and let us together examine a world beyond our current knowing.
Each piece of my art shares an extraordinary synchronistic moment that took me on a journey through love, loss, grief, and defining my way forward to build my new life.
My new memoir, 'Losing Him, Finding Me ' is my platform to share that which is unexpected, unexplainable yet in its telling it opens the doors to ask questions so that we might know more in an ever-evolving world.
My thought-provoking seagull stories (original works on canvas and prints) invite you to look deeply into your everyday experiences to find those colliding events that connect us to our bigger story.
