Julia Goldman

Though she claims to have initially resisted figurative painting, Julia Goldman finds a happy medium between abstraction and figuration in her mid-scale compositions focused on sketchily rendered female figures. Foregrounding the process of painting and its material qualities, she applies oil to canvas in a range of ways, mixing impasto smears with thin washes of pigment, and thick brushstrokes with small blocks of color shaped with a palette knife. These planes and expressive lines resolve into the flattened faces and bodies of the young women who populate her work. Goldman often works in series, making gradual adjustments to an image to explore the possibilities of variation within repetition. “I like to create constants so that I can focus on a few variables,” she explains. “The options are staggering, so to let myself wander I build (temporary) walls.”