Juli Adams
Art is the language of the experience of being human. Like a microscope slows life down to its most basic elements, art has the potential to expose the magnitude and beauty of the inner life as it reflects not only the artist but all people.
The artist's greatest gift is the present. To be truly present is to have the ability to expose the underlying truth of who we are. In turn, this understanding benefits our solidarity as a human race. In this way we are more able to communicate, empathize, and take action to make our world a better place to live in.
I was raised in the foothills of Washington's Cascade Mountains. When I was little, there were bears. Mines. Swamps. The old lady who ate rabbits, and not much else. It was a wonderland, and I fell in love with it. Especially the trees who held all the necessary danger, darkness and beauty to become my first teachers. I watched them from my swingset. I studied them from my bedroom window. I sat, cold, on the rocking chair under the covered deck admiring them in the snow. I listened to them in the wind. They taught me how to pay attention. Nothing else seemed as noble as the trees.
By and by I sensed something of the trees in people, the way their personalities moved through their bodies, transformed into their most natural and unconscious selves. Somehow the trees taught me to see beauty in everything around me.
It has since become more than individual personalities. It has become a lens through which to view the world in all of its strange and inexplicable selves. This is what I paint.