Julie A. Higgins
2008 Garden Tour Poster ArtistThe Mendocino Art Center is pleased to have Mendocino artist Julie Higgins as this year’s poster artist for the annual Garden Tour. Julie’s lush and evocative landscapes are a perfect tie-in for the beautiful gardens on the Art Center tour.
Julie Higgins was born in Kansas and studied art at the University of Kansas, so she is very much a product of the American heartland and its fertile landscape and organic forms, all reflected in her sensual pastel paintings. From Kansas she went to the Skagit Valley in Washington State, and then came to Mendocino.
Photo Credit: Larry R. WagnerLiving always surrounded by sensual environments, Julie’s paintings evolved as rich, vibrant, boldly colorful, symbolic images of fertile landscapes and voluptuous women whose bodies echo the contours of the land. Her paintings tell a story, and evoke a mythology of elemental forces and of connections with the earth as a life force. She works primarily in pastel, for its brilliant color and its tactile quality.
In her artist’s statement, Julie explains that her work “is a constant process of story telling and pushing through the mundane of life into the magic, and the imaginary, which connects me to my sense of nature and how I belong or fit in. It is feeling, emotion and play set in an ever nurturing landscape with juicy, earthy women, sensual form, and lots of color.”
Julie’s work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums, has won many awards, and can be found in private collections across the country.
Banner/Cafe Beaujolais Gardens,
Photo Credit: John Birchard
Garden Paradise, Julie A. Higgins