JULIE MAREN

Colorado native and Boulder based artist, Julie Maren, originally began her career as a painter and stone carver. However, her desired to combine the two and blur the boundaries of both led to an intense period of experimentation known around her home as “The Emergency.” During this time, she cut up her paintings with a jigsaw to reconfigured them into large dimensional collages, took up ceramics, and began experimenting with filling acorn caps with paint. Ultimately, this journey led her to the wall based installations she is now focused on creating. As an artist, Maren is driven by materials and experimentation, color and pattern, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives and creating depth, both dimensional and illusionary. Loose narratives are often woven throughout her works, expressed through color and her unique vocabulary of imagery and symbolism.

Julie Maren received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her artwork is exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and is part of worldwide private and corporate collections. She has illustrated two children's books, "Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa" and "An Orange in January," both for Dial/Penguin Books, received major grants from the Colorado Commission on the Arts and the Boulder Art's Commission. Her sculptural work was commissioned for Boulder's Pearl Street pedestrian mall and she has attended sculpture symposiums in Wellington, New Zealand, Bangalore, India and Marble, Colorado. Maren also co-founded "The Women's Art League" is featured in a short film with Judy Chicago, "The Famous Women Dinner Service: In Conversation with Contemporary Art,” by the Yale Center for British Art, filmed the Brooklyn Museum.

I create flexible and adaptive “Biophilia” wall-sculptures/ installations out of acorn tops filled with paint and other material, mounted on brass rods. Appearing as bouncing dots of color, projected at different depths on the wall, these multi-dimensional “paintings” play with shape, color theory, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives—and transform with light and shadow.
Biophilia wall-sculptures are the result of my journey to take my paintings out of the confines of traditional square and rectangular canvases. I found paint filled acorn tops to be the perfect vehicle to transcend the omnipresent dot patterns in my paintings, indicative of space and time—and transform them into expansive, multi-dimensional murmurations of color and shadow—like coordinates on a three-dimensional grid.
The combination of the natural, familiar acorn tops filled with synthetic materials feels simultaneously familiar yet mysterious, and reminds of an engineered symbiosis or connectedness of nature and the artificial. I like using fluorescent and intense colors because it feels like I am reanimating the “dead” shells that nature has discarded, into new seductive organisms which appear to glow from within. Nature informs the palettes and biomorphic patterns of each installation—from the microscopic world of bioluminescent organisms on a beach to the macrocosm of star galaxies above.
2011 Rembrandt Yard, “Illuminated Manuscript,” Boulder, CO
2008 ArtHaus66, “Pageantry and the Inanimate Forest,” Albuquerque, NM
2007 Exhibitrek Gallery, “Co-Existence,’ Boulder, CO
2006 Exhibitrek Gallery, “Elegant Universe,” Boulder, CO
2003 Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, “Language of Being” Boulder, CO
2000 University of Colorado Research Park, “Haiku” Boulder, CO
1998 National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
“Artists to Look Out For, Volume 2,” Starry Night Program Catalogue, (juried)
Spirituality and Health Magazine, “Chasing Happiness,” art feature, Jan./ Feb. 2015, pg. 55
Spirituality and Health Magazine, “All Clear,” art feature, May/June 2014, pg. 39
“Denver Quarterly,” poetry journal, Cover art, published by University of Denver, vol. 39, # 2, 2004
“Many Mountains Moving,” literary journal, Artistic contributor, April 2004 2003
“Buddha Mom,” Cover art, Tarcher Books, 2003
2016 National Park Residency, Weir Farm Art Center, Wilton, CT
2008 Bushwick, self directed 1 year artist residency, Brooklyn, NY
2008 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
2004 The Valley School, International Sculpture Symposium, Bangalore, India,
2001 Tareitanga International Sculpture Symposium, Wellington, New Zealand
1995 -2018 MARBLE/marble Stone Carving Symposium, Marble, CO