Julia Ricketts
NEW! Read an interview with Julia Ricketts.
Ricketts brings to the classroom a sense of great excitement about the journey every drawing, painting, or cocktail napkin sketch represents. She believes that the act of putting marks on paper or canvas is full of enormous potential. As a teacher, she both enjoys and encourages the discoveries students make along the way. Her teaching style is positive, constructive, and critical, with an emphasis on compositional problem solving. She strives to help students build wider vocabularies with their materials, and to offer alternative views and approaches within the framework of student interests.
Ricketts received a BFA in printmaking and painting from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, NY. She has taught extensively throughout the Northwest and exhibits nationally. Her work is held in the Microsoft Collection, the King County Art Collection, the Seattle City Light Portable Works Collection, and numerous private collections.
Ricketts has been the recipient of the Artist Trust Gap Grant, a King County Special Projects Grant, and was an Emerging Artist in Residence at the Pilchuck Glass School in 2000. Ricketts recently completed a public commission for Seattle City Light's Electric Gallery. "Rivers and Their Dependents", a 14 x 100' mural, was on view at Western and Union Streets for four months in 2004.
To view additional work by this artist, please visit www.juliaricketts.com.
Artist's Statement
My work in painting is a dialogue with color, surface, and marks. This investigation often proceeds out imagery derived from the landscape, and these associations remain an underpinning of the work even when the image is submerged or abstracted.
The aerial perspective in particular has been a source of inspiration and an ongoing challenge to me as a painter. From the god-like perspective of flight, one looks down on the patterns of growth and development that mark our human interventions on the land with startling clarity. This intersection of natural and man-made shapes is one intriguing clue, which points to questions about our complex relationship to the land we live upon.
By isolating certain elements and images in this rich vein, I hope to raise questions in the viewer’s mind about the processes at work, and their relationship to the place they inhabit.
My work in painting is a dialogue with color, surface, and marks. This investigation often proceeds out imagery derived from the landscape, and these associations remain an underpinning of the work even when the image is submerged or abstracted.
The aerial perspective in particular has been a source of inspiration and an ongoing challenge to me as a painter. From the god-like perspective of flight, one looks down on the patterns of growth and development that mark our human interventions on the land with startling clarity. This intersection of natural and man-made shapes is one intriguing clue, which points to questions about our complex relationship to the land we live upon.
By isolating certain elements and images in this rich vein, I hope to raise questions in the viewer’s mind about the processes at work, and their relationship to the place they inhabit.